Occupational health
revere | February 14, 2008If you've ever boned a chicken (and who hasn't, right?) you know it isn't easy. It's hard on the hands and dangerous if you are doing it fast, with sharp knives. How fast? Say, a few thousand chicken breasts a day? Every day. Day after day. And doing it for chicken feed (metaphorically speaking), so you can't afford health insurance. But at least you get some medical care if you're hurt at work. From the company:
Mike Flowers is a powerful gatekeeper. He often decides whether to send poultry workers to a doctor when they get hurt on the job or complain of chronic pain.
"I think we do a pretty…
revere | February 1, 2008I'm an environmental epidemiologist with a special interest in surveillance. So it would be nice to say that epidemiological investigations and surveillance systems were responsible for discovering most of the workplace diseases we see nowadays. But the simple truth seems to be that most environmental and occupational diseases are still discovered the old fashioned way: by astute clinicians, workers or family members. Such was the case for the recent cluster of cases of a progressive neurologic syndrome among slaughterhouse workers we posted on a while back. The Minnesota Department of Health…
revere | December 21, 2007Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers.
It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli:
Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…
revere | December 18, 2007It is taking the Occupational Safety and Health Administratiohn (OSHA) a long time to write rules to protect flavoring workers from a serious lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, linked to artificial butter flavor used in microwave popcorn. According to the public health blog, The Pump Handle (which has been instrumental in keeping the diacetyl story alive), OSHA has initiated a rulemaking. But meanwhile another factor is pre-empting OSHA's tardy start. The market:
ConAgra has removed a controversial chemical from its microwave popcorn that gives the snack a buttery, creamy taste,…
revere | December 12, 2007It's bad enough that health care workers have to worry about getting bird flu, Ebola and SARS. But even if they aren't in contact with infected patients there are many other hazards in a health care institution. Ergonomics issues are a big deal (I worked my way through school as a "transport" worker in a radiology department and lifting patients is a good wway to hurt your back; I know). And so are dangerous chemicals:
Nurses who are exposed to high levels of chemicals and drugs on the job are more likely to report having asthma, miscarriages and some cancers, according to a survey released…
revere | December 10, 2007There are a lot of diseases out there you haven't heard of and most of them are things you don't want to get. One of them is a neurological autoimmune disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) where the body attacks the covering of nerve fibers and prevents impulse transmission. It produces paresthesias (tingling), numbness and weakness. If not treated early it can become debilitating and incapacitating. As I said, you don't want to get it.
But apparently CIPD is exactly what 11 workers at Quality Pork Products in Minneapolis did get. All worked at the "head…
revere | November 27, 2007Three times we have posted on the arcane topic of manhole covers. On the first it was to ask why manhole covers are round. On the second it was to elaborate on the theme of the first post, with reader assistance, and exhibit a stunning examples of manhole cover art with links to others. On the third it was to wonder how it was possible for a person or a dog to get shocked from a metal cover that is literally grounded. All of the posts concerned, at least in part, safety issues.
Jordan Barab, former blogmeister of Confined Space, sends us another important public health aspect of manhole…
revere | November 21, 2007Blog is short for weblog, originally a chronological set of postings about, well, about whatever. Blogs are/were journals that were published publicly but also allowed readers to comment, read, react and in some ways affect the content. How much dialog and two way communication there was depended on the blog. Some have virtually none, although monitoring traffic and interest is one kind of reader feedback that doesn't depend on a formal comment facility. Others are highly interactive, with lots of comment, a community feeling and vigorous discussion. The big innovation, though, was that the…
revere | November 20, 2007It's OK for storm victims to live in them, but don't let your employees enter them: FEMA. Who else?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is barring employees from entering thousands of stored travel trailers over concerns about hazardous fumes, while more than 48,000 other trailers continue to be used by hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.
FEMA is advising employees not to enter any of the roughly 70,000 trailers in storage areas across the country, but the directive does not apply to other trailers still in use, agency spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said Thursday. (AP; hat…
revere | November 16, 2007The blogosphere is pretty crowded these days and one might think there's no need for less, not more. But in public health, that's not the case. There are a lot of Doctor/Medical blogs but not many public health blogs. So yesterday marked a significant milestone in the public health blogosphere, the First Blogiversary of The Pump Handle. As Jordan Barab, lately of Confined Space fame, notes in a congratulatory comment over at TPH, first year blog mortality is extremely high, so just making it at all is a significant accomplishment.
But TPH didn't "just make it" but made it in real style. They…
revere | October 31, 2007Pesticides are one of the few kinds of chemicals specially designed to kill living things that we intentionally put into our environment in high volume. A large class of pesticides are the organophosphates (OPs), agents that affect the normal process of nerve impulse transmission.
What we call pests are one kind of organism they can kill, but OPs are unaware of our human categories like "pest." They are also adept at killing and sickening other organisms. Like us. They do it frighteningly often in the developing world, and they do it in the developed world as well. There is a nice Jack…
revere | October 9, 2007Fumigating the soil before planting pretty much kills any pests that might be in it. Unfortunately the fumigant tends to seep up through the soil and expose workers and others nearby. When the highly toxic fumigant methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal protocol as a greenhouse gas an ozone depleting gas, growers started looking for a replacement. Now the EPA has approved one, methyl iodide. If you know any chemistry, you might suspect that replacing one halogen with another might not solve the problem. Indeed methyl iodide is nasty. If you want to use it you must employ a certified…
revere | September 28, 2007If regulators in the state of California, a slate of scientists and doctors including 6 nobel laureates in chemistry and environmental and farmworker groups were all against registering a new toxic fumigant for fruits and vegetables, who would you expect to be in favor of it? If you guessed the Bush administration lap dog agency, the US Environmental Protection Agency, you'd be right. But it wasn't that hard a question.
The fumigant in question is methyl iodide, marketed by Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corp to take the place of methyl bromide, being phased out as a greenhouse gas under the…
revere | September 4, 2007The argument about whether bloggers ever do real reporting is not very interesting to us, but suffice it to say there are numerous instances where they do the same thing as journalists, even in the tiny public health blogosphere. A case in point is my colleague. Dr. David Michaels at The Pump Handle (TPH), who has been dogging the story of flavoring workers lung (aka popcorn workers lung) from the outset, and has even broken a few stories. Today's post at TPH may be the most significant entry yet. But first, some background.
It is now known that an ingredient in microwave popcorn with…
revere | August 16, 2007Either there are more lab accidents in biodefense laboratories or we are hearing about them more (see here, here, here, here, here.). Since there are always lab accident but there is a lot more "biodfense" laboratory work, it is probably both. I think we can look forward to the Bush administration solving this problem by declaring lab accidents in biodefense labs a state secret. That way we won't have to worry about hearing about them any more. But until that happens, we can look forward to more of stuff like this:
A graduate student at Jackson's University Medical Center had to be treated…
revere | July 20, 2007If you work for Tyson foods, one of the US's largest poultry producers, you probably aren't very worried about bird flu. That's because you are too busy worrying about not getting cut to pieces, electrocuted, maimed from a fall or burned to death. As part of a strategy of increased attention to workplaces with higher than usual worker injury rates the US Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) inspected the Tyson poultry processing plant in Noel, Missouri, and found "serious, willful, and repeat" health and safety violations. The plant was fined almost $350,000 as a result.…
revere | June 18, 2007If you've ever been to Duluth, Minnesota in the wintertime, at the top of the state on Lake Superior, you know how cold it can get. And if you go another 50 miles up the shore you'll come to Silver Bay. Also cold. And dangerous in another way. It is a cancer hot spot for perhaps the deadliest cancer we know, mesothelioma.
Silver Bay is in the iron range and was the site of one of the most famous of the early environmental cases, when the Environmental Protection Agency was new and so was the idea of protecting people from an unhealthy environment. The case involved the Reserve Mining Company…
revere | June 10, 2007Maybe you didn't hear about the poison gas attacks on American communities this year. No? Well in January two towns in Kentucky were attacked, a day apart. OK, there weren't exactly not exactly attacked. That part isn't true. But assume for a moment that each of the following two incidents was the result of terrorists:
Irvine, Kentucky, January 15, 2007: Four railway training cars were sent careening twenty miles down a track before colliding with unoccupied engines in a town of 3000 people. On impact, a flammable solvent, butyl acetate, ignited and then exploded. People living in twenty…
revere | June 7, 2007We need to celebrate our victories, small as some are. I learned from my SciBling, Grrl, over at Living the Scientific Life that Elsevier is abandoning their ill gotten gains as enablers of international arms merchants, a role we and many others posted on. Her summary is excellent. Here's some more detail:
As first reported by The Scientist, the Anglo-Dutch publishing behemoth, which puts out more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 books annually, has bowed to pressure from leading scientists and will no longer organize trade shows for weapons merchants.
Despite the profitability of the company's…
revere | May 28, 2007Memorial Day in the United States, a day to remember 'The Fallen,' those who have died in the service of their country, their community, their families. Historically and by tradition The Fallen have been soldiers. But why? There are so many more. Firefighters, police, social workers, nurses, doctors, "ordinary" working people who have died on the job in the service of their country, community and families.
About 100 years ago steelworker Andrew Kovaly, a Slovak immigrant -- I don't know (or care) if he was "legal" (can a person ever be "illegal"?) -- was working in the hellish mills of…