Regulations
revere | December 1, 2008Barack Obama will become President of the United States in just 50 days, but the still-President, George W. Bush, is still trashing the place prior to going out the door. The latest outrage is the rush to complete a rule the new President is strongly opposed to. Somehow I don't think that's the way it's supposed to work, but that's the way it's working. If you are committed to safer workplaces in this country, the new rule is a monstrosity that will make jobs more dangerous for whoever will still have a job after this administration's policies have played out:
The rule, which has strong…
revere | November 18, 2008It's now two and half months since CDC and US FDA declared an end to the infamous tomatoes-no-it's-peppers salmonella outbreak of last summer. The outbreak itself was even longer: 3 months. There were some 1400 reported cases but probably many more that escaped detection. That's typical for foodborne disease outbreaks.
In case you've forgotten, here's a summary, courtesy Georgetown University's Produce Safety Project (PSP):
Although CDC and FDA initially pointed in early June to tomatoes as the cause of the outbreak based on epidemiological data, no contaminated tomato was ever found. In…
revere | November 17, 2008The team of investigative reporting team of Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just keeps rolling along, this time with an amazing story about how microwave safe plastics are leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) at potentially unsafe levels. We are saying potentially unsafe because we really know little about the effects of hormone mimics like BPA except that at levels currently found in BPA containing plastics in contact with food and liquids produce biological effects in test systems and a recent analysis of a representative survey of US adults showed an association…
revere | November 15, 2008You probably never heard of the EPA Appeals Board, but they have just handed down a ruling that will affect scores of power plants using coal. Affect them how? Not clear at the moment:
The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve.
The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.
The…
revere | November 4, 2008The tort system is the favorite whipping boy of the anti-regulation crowd. That's because once you remove regulation, something the Bush administration has championed and done effectively, the only recourse someone injured by the fraud or negligence of a product or drug manufacturer is through a lawsuit for damages. Since the anti-regulation crowd serves Big Pharma and their cronies, this is the perfect solution: no constraints. The propaganda machine, aided an abetter by a compliant congress and a business dominated media, has been extremely successful in promoting the idea that tort suits…
revere | November 3, 2008There are only 77 days left in the Bush administration. Hallelujah. Finally an end to the carnage, right? Not so fast! Unless you think it's not doing any damage to: remove animals from the endangered species list without adequate public participation, putting power plants near national parks, making it easier to blow the tops of mountains off so coal operators can get to dirty coal or loosening regulations on disposal of factory farm wastes. If that's your idea of good environmental stewardship and "no more carnage," you'll be delighted to hear that the Bushies are making haste to ramrod…
revere | November 1, 2008Blogging can vary in spontaneity. Some bloggers spend a lot of effort honing individual posts, while some do a lot of "one offs" in response to rapidly changing events. A limiting form of the latter is "live blogging," essentially reporting in real time during a meeting, demonstration or particular event. In this sense blogging isn't very different than print journalism. There are stories that are quickies, just reporting some facts or acting as a stenographer for the government, a political campaign or commercial press release. Then there are the more in-depth analytical and investigative…
revere | October 30, 2008We've been keeping an eye out for the FDA's expert task force review of their own draft report on bisphenol-A (BPA; for more posts see here, here, here, here, here for other BPA posts). We previously reported to you the concern that the (outside) chair of that expert panel had a risk assessment institute at the University of Michigan that was the recipient of a large gift from one of the most vociferous proponents of BPA's safety and an ardent anti-regulatory ideologue. Whether it was a result of "working the refs" or a straightforward judgment, the panel has returned its report, concurring…
revere | October 24, 2008Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…
revere | October 18, 2008Here's some public health man-bites-dog news. George Bush's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something right:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set stringent new standards for airborne lead particles, following the recommendations of its science advisers and cutting the maximum allowable concentrations to a tenth of the previous standard. It was the first change in federal lead standards in three decades.
[snip]
The new standards set the limits for exposure at 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 1.5 micrograms, and well within the outer limit of 0.2…
revere | October 14, 2008 I run a fairly large research program at my University. My NIH grant, which runs in the tens of millions, pays for a lot of things, including a portion of my salary. But as Director, my salary is (alas) only a tiny portion of this complex operation, which has many senior principal investigators and core facilities, labs, research groups, post docs, students, research staff, etc., etc. The whole operation has to fit together and work. We're big but not huge. So $5 million, while accounting noise in Wall Street bailout terms, is a pretty big deal and not because of the paltry half salary I…
revere | September 17, 2008We've discussed the component of plastics bisphenol A (BPA) here before (here, here) but yesterday the Journal of the American Medical Association published a significant paper with an accompanying editorial that deserves mention. A panel of the FDA was scheduled to meet the same day to review FDA's draft assessment that BPA was not a safety problem in the US food supply and environment. As a result of the JAMA article, the ranking member of the Committee on Finance, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has written to the Commissioner of the FDA asking for a clarification of the FDA's position on the…
revere | September 14, 2008Suppose you were a cattle dealer and the US Food and Drug Administration, one of the federal agencies tasked with keep the food supply safe issued you a court order, twice, prohibiting you from putting your product into the food supply until you complied with a legally required record keeping system. The agency had their eye on you because the meat you produced had been found repeatedly to have illegal levels of antibiotics making it unfit for human consumption. But you didn't care and you violated the court orders. So the FDA went after you and you were found in criminal and civil contempt…
revere | September 10, 2008We're well into September and flu season is approaching. Seasonal likely won't peak for another four or five months in the US and Europe but we should expect to start seeing cases in the northern hemisphere soon. A pandemic strain could happen at any time. The 1918 flu's second wave started in late August, so the timing of the start of a pandemic is not so predictable. At least one things seems certain, however. We shouldn't expect to see it starting in the current hot spot for human bird flu, Indonesia. Because the Indonesian government, in the person of Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari,…
revere | September 1, 2008This really makes me crazy. I've already ranted about it at least twice (here and here), going back to January 2005. I thought this one was settled in the only way commonsense would allow. But commonsense isn't very common with some judges.
Here's the gist. Back in 2004 a small meatpacker, Creekstone Farms, wanted to test its cattle for mad cow disease (BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy). There is no cure for BSE. In fact there isn't even a treatment for it. It's fatal 100% of the time. The best you can do is prevent it. You do this by not allowing cattle that harbor the agent, an…
revere | August 20, 2008Everyone seems to agree about one thing concerning Vice President Cheney's senior aide, F. Chase Hutto III. He never met an environmental regulation he didn't just hate and oppose on principle. According to the Washington Post he has been instrumental in keeping our air and water dirtier than it needs to be. Just another day at the office in the Bush administration. Now, in the waning days of the Bush Reich, they want to name him a high official in the Department of Energy where he will in charge of policies related to climate change. The foundation of the climate change debate is the science…
revere | August 13, 2008The Bush administration wants to slow walk worker protection regulations, even when required by law, through the use of additional layers of review by the Office of Management and Budget. We wrote about this recently here (and see Celeste Monforton's excellent work at The Pump Handle). But let's be fair. The Bush administration doesn't always want to slow up rule making. At least not when wealthy land developers or their cronies in federal agencies are concerned:
The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction…
angrytoxicologist | August 8, 2008A reader (thanks Jen) alerted me to this article on Forbes, The FDA's Black Box. The basics of the article are that the FDA can't say anything about drug approvals or non-approvals (or anything else relating to a drug for that matter) if it deals with information that the drug company submitted, since that information is confidential by law. The article thinks Congress should give FDA the ability to release this to the public. Here's why Forbes thinks this is a good idea:
1) Companies fool Wall Street all the time into thinking a drug is the next best thing only to find out all of a sudden…
revere | August 1, 2008There's a mighty storm a brewin' in the occupational health world. It is always a marvel to us that no matter how jaded we think we are, there is always room for more indignation. It is the Bush administration's only form of renewable energy.
The issue first poked its head above water on July 8 when my colleague Celeste Monforton over at The Pump Handle noticed something suspicious on the website of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced oh-EYE-ra):
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA's webpage today, and my paranoia about…
angrytoxicologist | July 31, 2008Let's just put it in a hole
CO2 sequestration has been going forward but only approved as research class wells. The EPA is proposing regulations on how to do it full scale and correctly. This is necessary because the CO2 may have nasty impurities, can move around, is corrosive with water, and is a weak acid. In other words, mixing with water supplies is bad.
You mean if I screw up, I've got to fix it? That's un-American!
The main contentious issue here is what are industries' responsibilities after the well is filled and capped. How much should they have to put up for financial assurances in…