worker safety
lborkowski | April 29, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Ken Ward Jr. at Sustained Outrage: Protecting workers: Progress under Obama? (Also see his related Coal Tattoo piece on mine safety in the Obama administration)
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: What vaccine refusal really costs: Measles in Arizona
Body Horrors: Blood Money: Hookworm Economics in the Postbellum South
Shadowfax at Movin' Meat: Why Patients are Not Consumers (related: Paul Krugman's Patients are Not Consumers)
Tara C. Smith at Aetiology: Staph in food -- what does it mean?
David Rosenfeld at DC Bureau: California turns to Mexico for Cheap Water,…
egrossman | April 20, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
When the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 of the 126 workers on board and critically injuring three, the ruptured Macondo well - located nearly a mile beneath the sea surface about 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana - unleashed what has been called the largest accidental release of oil in history. By the time the well was capped on July 15th, an estimated five million barrels of oil had flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, affecting more than 350 miles of Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Florida.
The clean-up response launched has also…
lborkowski | April 15, 2011In much of the reporting I've seen on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the plant workers are an anonymous, if much-praised, group. The New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi digs deeper to tell us more about who some of these workers are, and what their experiences can tell us about occupational health and safety in Japan. He begins with the story of 55-year-old Masayuki Ishizawa, who was at the plant when the earthquake struck and had to plead with the security guard to be let out the of the complex to flee the tsunami:
Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he…
lborkowski | April 11, 2011Back in August, our New Solutions: The Drawing Board partnership with the journal New Solutions featured a post by Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson about the situation in Cananea, Mexico, where miners have been striking against the Asarco/Grupo Mexico copper operation for more than three years. The miners are demanding improvements not only to unsafe working conditions, but to the local environment.
Fischel and Nelson were part of a group that visited Cananea last year through a tour arranged by the United Association of Labor Education and hosted by an organization of the Mexican Miners Union…
lborkowski | April 8, 2011Last year, psychiatric technician Donna Gross was killed on the job at Napa State Hospital, allegedly by a patient who had a pass that gave him unsupervised access to the grounds. In a two-part series, NPR's Ina Jaffe talks with staff, directors, and patients from two psychiatric hospitals, Napa State Hospital and Atascadero State Hospital, about patient violence.
Both hospitals treat mentally ill patients who arrive through the criminal justice system; Atascadero was designed from the start to treat mentally ill criminal offenders, while Napa had hardly any criminal commitments 20 years ago…