chemicals

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 16:40:20 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At PBS Newhour, Aubrey Aden-Buie reports on the shipbuilders that receive billions in federal contracts despite histories of serious safety lapses. In a review of federal contracts, Aden-Buie and colleagues found that since 2008, the federal government has awarded more than $100 billion to companies with records of safety incidents that injured and killed workers.

In a transcript of the broadcast (which you can also watch at the link above), Aden-Buie interviews Martin Osborn, a welder at shipbuilder Austal USA in Alabama:

MARTIN OSBORN: I was up in a boom lift, as we call it, or a man lift, up in the air about 40 feet, cutting a lifting lug off the side of a module, and had a violent kickback. It kicked out of my hands and went across my left hand, cutting me pretty bad. I didn’t take my glove off, because, I knew if I did that, I would have blood everywhere.

AUBREY ADEN-BUIE: Before Osborn’s accident, Austal modified the Metabo grinder by replacing the standard disc with a sawtooth blade made by an outside company. This made the tool more versatile, able to cut through aluminum more quickly.

But the manufacturer of the grinder specifically warned against using these blades, saying they cause frequent kickback and loss of control.

MARTIN OSBORN: I have seen pictures of people getting cut in their face, in their necks, in their thighs. It’s the most dangerous tool I have ever put in my hands.

AUBREY ADEN-BUIE: Does Austal know that the tool is as dangerous as it is?

MARTIN OSBORN: Yes, ma’am, they do.

AUBREY ADEN-BUIE: Company e-mails among Austal’s managers obtained by Reveal show that, even before Osborn’s accident, they called the modification lethal, and the grinders an accident waiting to happen.

Yet, according to Osborn, Austal workers still use the grinder daily.

MARTIN OSBORN: I have had numerous supervisors tell me that, you know, if you don’t want to use the tool, go get a job at Burger King.

To read or view the full story, visit PBS Newshour.

In other news:

Texas Tribune: Andy Duehren reports that Texas legislators are considering a measure that would kill regulations in the capital city of Austin that expedite the permitting process for large construction projects that agree to pay construction workers a living wage, follow worker safety standards, and offer worker training and workers’ comp insurance. The measure being considered in the state legislature would accelerate permitting across the state, while prohibiting cities from enacting measures like the one in Austin. In particular, Republican state Rep. Paul Workman, who helped author the legislation, seems to dislike the Austin-based worker center, the Workers Defense Project, that helped craft the Austin regulations, calling the group a “union front.” Duehren writes: “Workman is one of many lawmakers who have received financial support from real estate and construction interests, according to the data from Texans for Public Justice. Gifts to lawmakers from those two industries totaled more than $23 million between 2013 and 2016, the group found.”

The Hill: Timothy Cama reports that congressional Democrats have introduced legislation that would ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos. That’s the same pesticide that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided not to ban, despite the recommendations of EPA’s scientific advisors. The pesticide was recently involved in sickening farmworkers in California, and research shows it can cause neurological problems in children and fetuses. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said of the legislation: “Administrator Pruitt may choose to put aside science, public health and environmental protection in favor of big chemical profits, but Congress should not.”

Bloomberg BNA: David McAfee reports that Chevron has settled with Cal/OSHA officials to pay more than $1 million in fines and make comprehensive safety changes at its refinery in Richmond, California, after a 2012 fire at the refinery sent a cloud of gas and smoke over the nearby community. Cal/OSHA issued 17 workplace safety and health violations following the incident. As part of the new agreement, Chevron will make safety upgrades to the refinery’s equipment, provide training in hazard recognition and continue working with the United Steelworkers. McAfee quoted Clyde Trombettas, statewide manager and policy adviser for Cal/OSHA’s process safety management unit: “The penalty, $1,010,000, was the highest penalty assessed on any employer in Cal/OSHA history, which I think is very significant.”

Reveal: Sinduja Rangarajan reports that the House Appropriations Committee has approved a budget amendment to defund an initiative designed to narrow wage disparities and that required some employers to disclose pay data by gender, race and job category. In particular, the House amendment would prohibit the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from using funds to collect such data. Among those opposing the initiative was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which argued that collecting such data was a burden for employers and that it would reveal sensitive information. Rangarajan reports: “The data would help the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission benchmark pay patterns within industries, occupations and localities and take a closer look at firms that fall outside those patterns, said Emily Martin, general counsel and vice president of workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Wed, 07/26/2017 - 12:40

Tags

agriculture

Cal/OSHA

california

Chemical facility safety

Occup Health News Roundup

Occupational Health & Safety

OSHA

Pesticides

Public Health - General

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 17:12:17 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Center for Public Integrity, a five-part investigative series on safety at the nation’s nuclear facilities finds that workers can and do suffer serious injuries, yet the Department of Energy typically imposes only minimal fines for safety incidents and companies get to keep a majority of their profits, which does little to improve working conditions. Reporters estimated that the number of safety incidents has tripled since 2013.

For example, in 2009, the chair of a safety committee at Idaho National Laboratory told high-ranking managers that damaged plutonium plates could put workers at serious risk. However, managers ignored his warnings. Then an incident occurred in which 16 workers inhaled plutonium dust particles.

In Part 5 of the series, Patrick Malone and Peter Cary write:

Ted Lewis knew the plutonium plates at the government lab where he worked could leak potentially lethal radioactive dust.

He had seen it occur in the 1970s, when he was helping load some of those plates into a nuclear reactor at the lab near Idaho Falls, Idaho. A steel jacket enclosing one of the plates somehow cracked, spilling plutonium oxide particles into the air. But Lewis and his colleagues were lucky — they were wearing respirators and given cleansing showers, so their lives weren’t endangered.

Three decades later, Lewis, an electrical engineer who had become chairman of the lab’s safety committee, had a bad feeling this could happen again, with a worse outcome. And he turned out to be right.

He tried to head it off. In 2009, Lewis wrote a pointed warning memo — he called it a White Paper — and gave it to the official in charge of all nuclear operations at the Idaho National Laboratory, which is run by a consortium of private companies and universities under contract to the Energy Department.

The memo said the chance of encountering a plutonium plate that disintegrated, as Lewis had previously witnessed, was “greater than facility and senior management realizes,” according to a copy. Although Lewis said that a workplace manual published by the contractor — Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC (BEA) — called the risk of an accidental spill of such radioactive dust “negligible,” he wanted his superiors to expect it and prepare for it.

He said in a sworn court deposition in January 2016 that he shared his concerns with at least 19 others at the laboratory, which holds one of the world’s largest stockpiles of plutonium, the explosive at the heart of modern nuclear weapons. But they didn’t respond, he said, and some of the precautions he urged — checking the plates more carefully before they were unwrapped and repackaged for shipment and setting up a decontamination shower — were ignored.

Read the full (and amazing) investigative series at the Center for Public Integrity.

In other news:

USA Today: Brett Murphy reports on a year-long investigation into port trucking companies in Southern California, finding that such companies often treat their workers like little more than indentured servants, forcing drivers to take on huge debt to finance their own trucks and then using that debt against them to “trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.” When drivers quit, the companies seize their trucks, keeping all the money the workers had paid toward ownership. Drivers also reported being physically barred from going home, being forced to work against their will, and being forced to break safety laws that limit the hours they drive each day. The investigative piece is based on accounts from more than 300 drivers, hundreds of hours of sworn testimony and contracts never seen by the public. Murphy writes: “Retailers could refuse to allow companies with labor violations to truck their goods. Instead they’ve let shipping and logistics contractors hire the lowest bidder, while lobbying on behalf of trucking companies in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Walmart, Target and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies have paid lobbyists up to $12.6 million to fight bills that would have held companies liable or given drivers a minimum wage and other protections that most U.S. workers already enjoy.”

Huffington Post: Jesselyn Cook reports that seven journalists have been murdered in Mexico this year, which means Mexico is now among the most dangerous places to be a reporter. The most recent victim was Salvador Adame, a veteran TV reporter who covered regional news and politics. Months before Adame’s death, reporter Miroslava Breach Velducea, a reporter for La Jornada, was shot eight times outside her home in front of her children. Unfortunately, the killing of journalists in Mexico often goes unpunished. Cook writes: ‘“Fear and self-censorship by journalists remains very, very strong,’ Emmanuel Colombié, Latin America director for Reporters Without Borders (or Reporters sans frontières), told HuffPost. Some reporters have fled Mexico and others have quit the industry as a result of targeted threats and violence against members of the Mexican press, he noted. In the border state of Tamaulipas, for example, ‘there are very few journalists remaining,’ Colombié said.”

High Plains Public Radio: Grant Gerlock reports that a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the safety data collected by federal officials doesn’t accurately reflect all the dangers that meat and poultry workers face on the job. According to the GAO report, 151 meat and poultry workers died from on-the-job injuries between 2004 and 2013, which means such workers experience a higher injury rate than their peers in the rest of the manufacturing industry. However, the GAO also found that such injuries are under-reported. For example, injuries among sanitary workers who clean meat plant machinery aren’t always counted as official meat and poultry workers. In addition, some injured workers are simply encouraged to return to work without seeing a doctor. Gerlock writes: “Worker advocates say they have long been suspicious of reported injury rates from meat companies. For instance, a recent study at a Maryland poultry plant by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found one-third of workers had injuries that meet the definition of carpal tunnel, but only a handful of injuries had been reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”

American Prospect: David Bacon reports that after four years of strikes and boycotts, the first new U.S. farmworker union in 25 years has officially launched: Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) in Washington state. The union’s origins go back to 2013, when workers at Sakuma Brothers Farms grew angry about low piece rates and poor conditions in the labor camps. Workers then discovered that employers had begun recruiting workers via the H2A visa program and paying them nearly $3 more an hour than local workers, even though the visa program is supposed to be for employers unable to find workers locally. Eventually, the employers attempted to fire the entire workforce and replace them with H2A workers. The plan backfired after workers exposed the scheme, paving the way for a union. Bacon reports: “’We are part of a movement of indigenous people,’ says Felimon Pineda, FUJ vice president. An immigrant from Jicaral Cocoyan de las Flores in Oaxaca, he says organizing the union is part of a fight against the discrimination indigenous people face in both Mexico and the United States: ‘Sometimes people see us as being very low. They think we have no rights. They're wrong. The right to be human is the same.’”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Fri, 06/30/2017 - 13:12

Tags

agriculture

Chemical facility safety

Occup Health News Roundup

Occupational Health & Safety

Public Health - General

nuclear facility safety

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 16 May 2017 13:35:10 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At BuzzFeed, Kate Moore tells the story of the “radium girls,” the hundreds of women during WWI who worked painting watch dials with luminous radium paint — a substance that would eventually poison and kill them even though they were told it was perfectly safe. What followed was years of employers covering up and denying evidence that radium was killing workers, while berating the women for attempting to get help with their mounting medical bills.

Eventually, Moore writes, their fight for justice led to one of the first cases in which an employer was held responsible for the health of workers, helping lay the foundations of modern labor law. Among the many watch painters highlighted in the story was Molly Maggia, whose illness began with a toothache and then traveled to her limbs, eventually leaving her unable to walk:

By May 1922, Mollie was desperate. At that point, she had lost most of her teeth and the mysterious infection had spread: Her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and even some of the bones of her ears were said to be "one large abscess." But worse was to come. When her dentist prodded delicately at her jawbone in her mouth, to his horror and shock, it broke against his fingers. He removed it, "not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out." Only days later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.

Mollie was literally falling apart. And she wasn’t the only one; by now, Grace Fryer, too, was having trouble with her jaw and suffering pains in her feet, and so were the other radium girls.

On September 12, 1922, the strange infection that had plagued Mollie Maggia for less than a year spread to the tissues of her throat. The disease slowly ate its way through her jugular vein. At 5 p.m. that day, her mouth was flooded with blood as she hemorrhaged so fast that her nurse could not staunch it. She died at the age of 24. With her doctors flummoxed as to the cause of death, her death certificate, erroneously, said she’d died of syphilis, something her former company would later use against her.

As if by clockwork, one by one, Mollie’s former colleagues soon followed her to the grave.

Read the full story at BuzzFeed.

In other news:

Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting): Jennifer Gollan reports that even though a new OSHA rule requires employers to electronically submit their injury and illness records by July 1, the agency doesn’t yet have a working website where employers can actually comply with the law. Instead, the OSHA site says: “OSHA is not accepting electronic submissions at this time.” The reporting rule, which also protects workers against retaliation for reporting injuries, is currently being contested in court by a number of industry groups, including the National Association of Home Builders and National Association of Manufacturers. Gollan quotes former OSHA chief David Michaels: “Because the secretary of labor is not allowing OSHA to post this website, it means tens of thousands of employers will be in violation of the law. …Law-abiding employers are asking where to send their information in. OSHA is ignoring the law.”

Mother Jones: Tom Philpott reports that local public health officials believe that more than 50 farmworkers outside of Bakersfield, California, were exposed to the highly toxic pesticide chlorphyrifos, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had been close to banning. Then in March, agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to greenlight the chemical for continued agricultural use. After learning of the incident, Kern County public health officials urged anyone exposed to seek medical attention immediately. In humans, chlorphyrifos can cause a range of problems, from vomiting and diarrhea to tremors and blurred vision. Philpott reports: “A spokesman for (Kern County Department of Agriculture and Measurement Standards) said test results pinpointing the chemical are pending but would not be done for at least a week. Dow AgroSciences, one of the main makers of the chemical, did not respond to phone calls and emails.”

Rewire: Nicole Knight reports that two former Walmart employees have filed a class-action lawsuit claiming the company discriminated against them and many more pregnant workers by failing to provide appropriate on-the-job accommodations. One of the pregnant workers said after her doctor said to avoid heavy lifting, her supervisor “told her she had seen a pregnant Demi Moore do a somersault on television, and pregnancy was therefore ‘no excuse.’” It was only after lifting a 35-pound tray sent her to the hospital that she was allowed to do more sedentary work. She was later fired after asking about pregnancy leave. Knight quoted a representative of A Better Balance, one of the groups filing the complaint: “In 2017, it’s incredible that major companies like Walmart are discriminating against pregnant women — who are simply asking to keep on working and have a healthy pregnancy.”

Texas Observer: Gus Bova reports that a much-needed bill to improve housing conditions for Texas’ 200,000 migrant farmworkers has died in the state legislature. According to a 2016 investigation by the Austin American-Statesman, nine out of 10 Texas farmworkers lack access to licensed housing, with many workers forced to sleep packed together on the floors of houses that lack running water, ventilation or electricity. The bill aimed at improving such conditions would have mandated state officials regularly inspect farmworker housing and follow up on complaints, increased fines for violators, and enabled workers and advocates to appeal state licensing decisions. Bova quoted state Rep. Ramon Romero Jr.: “The biggest takeaway for me is that 50 or 60 years after my dad came here as a farmworker, the state of Texas hasn’t improved farmworker conditions, and is actually going in the opposite direction.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Tue, 05/16/2017 - 09:35

Tags

Occup Health News Roundup

Occupational Health & Safety

OSHA

paid leave

Public Health - General

pregnancy discrimination

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 02 May 2017 15:47:15 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who often end up working in the kind of dangerous and abusive conditions that few Americans would put up with.

Grabell chronicles the history of Case Farms and how it first began recruiting refugees from Guatemala who were fleeing a brutal civil war in their home country. A former Case Farms human resource manager said of the new Guatemalan workforce in a book cited in the article: “Mexicans will go back home at Christmastime. You’re going to lose them for six weeks. And in the poultry business you can’t afford that. You just can’t do it. But Guatemalans can’t go back home. They’re here as political refugees. If they go back home, they get shot.”

The article begins with the story of worker Osiel López. Grabell writes:

On April 7, 2015, Osiel put on bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, and trained a pressurized hose on the plant’s stainless steel machines, blasting off the leftover grease, meat and blood.

A Guatemalan immigrant, Osiel was just weeks past his 17th birthday, too young by law to work in a factory. A year earlier, after gang members shot his mother and tried to kidnap his sisters, he left his home, in the mountainous village of Tectitán, and sought asylum in the United States. He got the job at Case Farms with a driver’s license that said his name was Francisco Sepulveda, age 28. The photograph on the ID was of his older brother, who looked nothing like him, but nobody asked any questions.

Osiel sanitized the liver giblet chiller, a tublike contraption that cools chicken innards by cycling them through a near-freezing bath, then looked for a ladder, so that he could turn off the water valve above the machine. As usual, he said, there weren’t enough ladders to go around, so he did as a supervisor had shown him: He climbed up the machine, onto the edge of the tank, and reached for the valve. His foot slipped; the machine automatically kicked on. Its paddles grabbed his left leg, pulling and twisting until it snapped at the knee and rotating it 180 degrees, so that his toes rested on his pelvis. The machine “literally ripped off his left leg,” medical reports said, leaving it hanging by a frayed ligament and a five-inch flap of skin. Osiel was rushed to Mercy Medical Center, where surgeons amputated his lower leg.

Back at the plant, Osiel’s supervisors hurriedly demanded workers’ identification papers. Technically, Osiel worked for Case Farms’ closely affiliated sanitation contractor, and suddenly the bosses seemed to care about immigration status. Within days, Osiel and several others — all underage and undocumented — were fired.

Read the entire investigation, which was co-published with the New Yorker, at ProPublica.

In other news:

Washington Post: Drew Harwell reports that workers in the Chinese factory that produces Ivanka Trump’s fashion line work about 60 hours a week for little more than $62 per week. According to a factory audit, inspectors with the Fair Labor Association found two-dozen violations of international labor standards at the factory, where workers were getting at or below China’s minimum wage. The story comes as Ivanka Trump is positioning herself as an advocate for women in the workplace. Harwell reports: “Fewer than a third of the factory’s workers were offered legally mandated coverage under China’s ‘social insurance’ benefits, including a pension and medical, maternity, unemployment and work-related injury insurance, inspectors found. The factory also did not contribute, as legally required, to a fund designed to help workers afford housing, inspectors said.”

California Healthline (via KQED): Pauline Bartolone reports that advocates are calling on California lawmakers to approve a bill that would require cosmetic companies to disclose ingredients in products used in professional salons. The bill, which already passed the state Assembly health committee, would mandate product labeling that flags hazardous chemicals and require that manufacturers provide ingredient lists on their websites. Right now, federal labeling laws pertain to consumer products, but not to professional products used in salons. Bartolone reports: “Dr. Thu Quach, a researcher at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, says informing workers of potential risks is especially important given their level of exposure to salon products. Beauty salon workers may absorb chemicals both through their skin and the air they breathe, Quach said. A cosmetologist could apply a chemical-laden treatment to customers 10 times a day, or work in a space where chemicals are recirculating in the air all day, she added.”

Seattle Times: Janet Tu reports that a superior court judge has denied a motion from business trade groups to void the state’s new minimum wage and paid sick leave law, which Washington voters approved last year. In his ruling, the judge said plaintiffs had failed to prove the new laws violated the state constitution. The voter-approved initiative raises the state minimum wage to $13.50 by 2020 and requires paid sick leave for workers. Tu reports: “Judge Sparks wrote in a letter accompanying his ruling that he tries to adhere to the ‘bedrock principle’ that judges should not interfere with laws enacted by the people, whether through referenda or elected officials, unless there is a clear legal necessity.”

Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting): Jennifer Gollan reports on Trump’s proposal to cut $60 million in grants from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Affairs, which addresses child and forced labor abroad. In the budget proposal, Trump suggests that the agency should instead focus on ensuring trade agreements are fair for American workers. Gollan cites a 2014 report on conditions inside Malaysia’s electronics industry as an example of the work the grants support. That report, which revealed highly abusive labor conditions, led to increased scrutiny of the industry and stronger safeguards against trafficking. Gollan writes of the proposed Trump budget cut: “The cuts would hobble one of the country’s key methods for combatting child and forced labor around the globe, and potentially limit the federal government’s ability to help countries comply with labor provisions in 13 free trade agreements. In addition, the cuts could effectively do the opposite of what Trump intends by forcing U.S. companies to increasingly compete with overseas companies that flout worker safeguards and pay meager wages.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Tue, 05/02/2017 - 11:47

Tags

Occup Health News Roundup

Occupational Health & Safety

OSHA

paid leave

poultry plants

Public Health - General

safety

Toxics

workers' compensation

workers' compensation

The times, they are a'changin'. Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.

The article about the chicken processor leads to a difficult question: would it be better for all of the chicken to be processed by machines so no one is hurt, even if it means those people are out of work?

Similarly, $62/week is a lot better than $0/week.
The more work that goes to China, the more wages increase, and the more the government can afford to pay people to implement the kinds of regulations and oversight that we have recently developed in our country.

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 17:22:32 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Sacramento Bee, Ryan Lillis and Jose Luis Villegas report on the effects that Trump’s immigration crackdown is having on California farms, writing that fear of deportation is spreading throughout the state’s farming communities. While many farmworkers believe immigration raids are inevitable, farm operators, many who voted for Trump, hope the president will bring more water to the region and keep immigration officials off their fields. Lillis and Villegas write:

Fear is everywhere. The night before, the local school board became one of the first in California to declare its campuses a “safe haven” for students and families, meaning it won’t ask about students’ immigration status or allow federal immigration authorities onto school property.

That anxiety stretches throughout the southern San Joaquin Valley, among the most fertile and productive agricultural regions on Earth. As the spring picking season approaches, farmworkers are convinced the fields will be raided by federal agents intent on rounding up undocumented immigrants and shipping them back to Mexico or Central America. With many fearing the authorities will also set up checkpoints on the highways, the United Farm Workers union said the labor flow has already been cut in half at some farms.

“If they don’t need us here to work the fields, who’s going to do the work?” said a 54-year-old farmworker named Metorio, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and a father of three. The Sacramento Bee is only using his first name because he fears deportation.

“The workers who do this work are the Mexicans, the Latinos,” he said. “I hope President Trump will see how much the farmers need us.”

To read the full article, visit the Sacramento Bee.

In other news:

Toronto Star: Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the “epidemic of violence” that Ontario’s nurses and other health care workers face on the job – experiences that Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, recently wrote about in a letter to Ontario’s minister of labor. In that letter, Hurley said the threat of violence that health care workers face goes “unacknowledged, dismissed or tolerated by administrators and regulators.” Within the Canadian province, health care workers experience the second-highest number of reported injuries, ahead of industries such as construction, mining and manufacturing. Mojtehedzadeh writes: “Dianne Paulin, a registered practical nurse from North Bay with 25 years of job experience, says she would have been spared her life-changing injures if the psychiatric ward she worked on had implemented common sense policies like bolting down furniture. Instead, she was assaulted by a patient who pinned her against his room door with a chair and repeatedly punched her, leaving her with a bulging neck disc, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks.”

Charleston Gazette-Mail: Ken Ward Jr. reports that the West Virginia Senate is now considering an industry-backed bill that would dismantle the state’s miner safety laws. Among the changes proposed: state safety inspectors wouldn’t inspect mines anymore, they would conduct “compliance visits and education”; violators of health and safety standards wouldn’t receive fines, but “compliance assistance visit notices”; and state regulators wouldn’t have the authority to write safety and health regulations, but could only focus on improving compliance assistance. Ward Jr. writes: “One thing that is clear is that the bill would maintain and encourage the use of ‘individual personal assessments,’ which target specific mine employees — rather than mine operators or coal companies — for violations, fines and, possibly, revocation of certifications or licenses needed to work in the industry.” In related news, the New York Times Editorial Board recently published an opinion arguing that Trump’s promise to resurrect coal’s “heyday” is prompting the health and safety onslaught in state legislatures.

Bloomberg BNA: Sam Pearson reports that industry groups, along with House Republicans, are pushing for an infinite delay of OSHA’s updated beryllium standard. In a letter to OSHA, Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., said the agency had made a mistake by issuing standards for construction and shipyards, as its 2015 proposed rule only applied to general industry. Pearson writes: “In public comments, Sammy Almashat and Emily Gardner of Public Citizen countered that the postponement was ‘simply the latest in a 16-year-long series of delays of a rule that the entire scientific community agrees is urgently necessary to save thousands of workers from the risk of needless suffering and death.’”

BuzzFeed: Cora Lewis reports that nearly 350,000 service workers nationwide plan to strike on May 1, with tens of thousands of California SEIU members joining the protest. The strike is being driven by organized labor, but an overriding goal is to use the gathering to highlight “alt-labor” groups, such as worker centers. Lewis writes: “The Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, a food industry worker advocacy group, will also be participating in the strike, according to Saru Jayaraman, its co-director. ROC United and its network of restaurant owners and workers were instrumental in organizing the recent Day Without Immigrants protest, which shuttered hundreds of restaurants in cities across the country. America’s last major general strike was the first such Day Without Immigrants, in 2006, in which more than a million workers struck.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years.

kkrisberg Tue, 03/21/2017 - 13:22

Tags

Occup Health News Roundup

Occupational Health & Safety

OSHA

Public Health - General

violence in health care

The interesting thing about underground mining is IMHO it could now be done with robotics and no humans underground most of the time. In particular with the new longwall methods all the equipment is automated, add some tv cameras and fiber optic cables and no human need be at least at the working face, either they can be in a safe room or back on the surface. As an example from a related industry consider that on modern oil rigs all pipe handling needed to round trip a well is done by machines, Further continious miners are currently run with about a 30 foot cable.

Researchers identify thousands of fracking spills, highlight why data is critical to prevention

kkrisberg — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 20:51:54 +0000

Researchers identify thousands of fracking spills, highlight why data is critical to prevention

In 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report finding 457 fracking-related spills in eight states between 2006 and 2012. Last month, a new study tallied more than 6,600 fracking spills in just four states between 2005 and 2014. But, as usual, the numbers only tell part of the story.

Not every spill counted in that new number represents a spill of potentially harmful materials or even a spill that made contact with the environment. In fact, the study’s goal wasn’t to tally an absolute number of fracking spills. Instead, researchers set out to collect available spill data and then drill down (no pun intended) into the details to unearth common patterns and characteristics. And it’s those commonalities that can reveal the larger story of how to prevent such spills — which often contain health-harming chemicals — from happening in the first place.

“When you look across spills, what are the risk factors, in what stage of a well’s life are you most likely to see a spill, are we more likely to see a spill from a well that’s already experienced one, are there changes in the law or in enforcement that drive more spills,” asked study co-author Kate Konschnik, founding director of the Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative. “We wanted to see what the larger story told us about risk.”

The study, which was published in February in Environmental Science & Technology, comes from a working group convened by the Science for Nature and People Partnership and is part of a larger line of research trying to assess the risks that unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production, commonly referred to as fracking, pose to water resources. For instance, Konschnik and her colleagues published a different study in December that assessed the environmental risk of UOG spills by determining their distances from nearby streams. In the more recent study, Konschnik told me that there were two overriding goals: to look for trends in spill data and to tease out what kinds of spill data may be most useful in making UOG development safer.

To conduct the study, Konschnik and colleagues analyzed spill data from 2005 to 2014 at more than 31,400 UOG wells in Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania. They included spill data related to the full UOG production cycle, including storage and transportation, rather than focusing only on the fracturing stage. The study only included UOG production wells, not fracking disposal wells, which are used to store the often chemical-laden wastewater that comes back up to the surface during drilling. Researchers tried to include 11 other states in the study, but the data was either incomplete or too difficult to access.

Overall, researchers found 6,648 spills across the four states during the nine-year study period. That number exceeds the EPA findings by so much because the study included the entire fracking life cycle, whereas EPA only examined spills explicitly related to the fracturing stage. (“UOG is growing in scale and intensity…and a fairer examination of risk is to look at releases throughout (a well’s) entire life,” Konschnik told me.) North Dakota reported the most spills and the highest overall spill rate at about 12 percent. Pennsylvania reported 1,293 spills (4.3 percent), New Mexico had 426 (3.1 percent) and Colorado had 476 (1.1 percent). Across the four states, wells that experienced multiple spills contributed to a larger proportion of spills, indicating that prior spills may be an indicator of future spills.

Researchers also examined yearly spill rates, finding that fluctuations were “likely” shaped by changes in state reporting requirements, “demonstrating how state policies directly impact efforts to identify and accurately assess UOG risk, their causes and potential mitigating remedies.” For example, when North Dakota switched reporting requirements from verbal to written, spill rates increased by up to 4 percent. And in Pennsylvania, annual spill rates increased as more inspectors were hired, the study found. Across all four states, the greatest spill risk occurred during the first three years of a well’s existence.

Spill volumes ranged from 1 gallon to up to 991,000 gallons. In addition to 46 freshwater spills, the total volume of spills associated with fracking chemicals, solutions and flowback ranged from more than 99,000 gallons in Pennsylvania to more than 203,000 gallons in Colorado. The most common pathways for spills, according to the study, were storage tanks and pits as well as flowlines. Spills related to transportation were also prevalent across the four states, with most associated with loading and unloading. As for what caused the spills, only Colorado and New Mexico explicitly asked for such information during reporting. In examining the available causal data, researchers found that human error and equipment failures were the most common culprits.

One of the study's biggest takeaways was the importance of data reporting as well as the challenge of varying reporting requirements. For example, in Colorado, reporting requirements are triggered for any fracking spill of 42 gallons or more that escapes secondary containment. While in New Mexico, reports are required for spills greater than 25 barrels or if an operator thinks a spill might endanger water quality or public health. Study co-authors Konschnik, Lauren Patterson, Hannah Wiseman, Joseph Fargione, Kelly Maloney, Joseph Kiesecker, Jean-Philippe Nicot, Sharon Baruch-Mordo, Sally Entrekin, Anne Trainor and James Saiers write:

Further improving reporting requirements and processes for reporting will facilitate states’ and companies’ efforts to identify risks for certain types of spills and take action to mitigate some of the identified risk factors. To the extent that this information is publicly available and searchable, operators can use it to remove or mitigate risk factors to improve environmental performance and avoid higher insurance premiums.

Assembling these data electronically within a centralized database would allow state regulators and other stakeholders to identify trends, including the most common spill pathways and causes, as well as identify the wells or operators associated with unusually high spill rates. Making this information publicly available and providing it in an easy, usable format would allow operators, insurance companies, and citizen monitoring groups  to assess the largest and most prevalent risks and respond accordingly. This paper illustrates the benefits of having  available and accessible data.

Konschnik said that “without question,” the study reveals that many spills are likely preventable. For example, she said enhanced training or simple reminder signage could help prevent the human errors underscoring a significant portion of spills identified in the study. Other interventions are even simpler. For instance, she said the study’s data indicated that wildlife caused some of the spills, which could mean operators simply need to fence off areas to reduce spill risks.

As for the health hazards of such spills, this study doesn’t address that question. But Konschnik did say that current data — and, of course, more robust datasets — could help pinponit areas where public health monitoring is needed.

“Our data can be used as an indicator of where more research can be done,” she said. “If we had more robust data that was publicly available, you could dig much deeper…this is one piece of the puzzle in which a more granular view of spills data married with some community health assessment data and monitoring data could help determine whether or when there are risks to exposure.”

For residents living in fracking regions, finding spill data on one’s own can be quite difficult, Konschnik said. As such, she and her colleagues created an interactive website anyone can use to learn more about fracking spills and their causes — check it out here.

“UOG really is the wave of the future — that’s where we’ll see growth,” Konschnik told me. “And so these spills might be more representative of what we’ll see in the future.”

For a full copy of the study, visit Environmental Science & Technology.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years.

kkrisberg Wed, 03/01/2017 - 15:51

Study: Fast food packaging contains chemicals harmful to human health, environment

kkrisberg — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 17:13:01 +0000

Study: Fast food packaging contains chemicals harmful to human health, environment

Earlier this month, news broke of a study that found potentially health-harming chemicals in a variety of fast food packaging. Upon hearing such news, the natural inclination is to worry that you’re ingesting those chemicals along with your burger and fries. Study researcher Graham Peaslee says that’s certainly a risk. But perhaps the greater risk, he says, happens after that hamburger wrapper ends up in landfill and the chemicals seep into our environment and water.

The chemicals in question are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), which are used to make consumer products nonstick, waterproof and stain-resistant. Think carpets, upholstery and weather-resistant clothing. Previous research has found associations between exposures to PFASs and kidney and testicular cancer, low birth weight, thyroid disease, decreased sperm quality, pregnancy-induced hypertension and immunotoxicity in children. The chemicals have become somewhat ubiquitous too, detected worldwide in water, soil, sediment, wildlife and human blood samples. The study that Peaslee co-authored tested hundreds of fast food packaging samples for fluorine, a marker of PFASs, finding the element in about half of paper wrappers and one-fifth of paperboard samples.

The study, published earlier this month in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, ended up being the most comprehensive assessment to date on the presence of fluorinated chemicals in U.S. fast food packaging. However, Peaslee, a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, told me that the original intent of the study was actually to test out a novel technique he developed for measuring fluorine known as particle-induced gamma-ray emission (PIGE) spectroscopy. The technique is about 10 times faster than more typical methods — in other words, he said, researchers can test a product for fluorine in just three minutes, which means one could potentially test hundreds of samples in a day. And that means researchers could test entire categories of consumer products in relatively short time spans.

So, Peaslee and colleagues decided to try out the new testing method on a large sample of products, choosing fast food packaging because prior research had detected PFASs in such products. Study researchers ended up collecting more than 400 packaging samples from 27 fast food restaurant chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Chipotle, Starbucks, Jimmy Johns, Panera and Chick-Fil-A, with the majority of samples coming from western Washington, eastern Massachusetts, western Michigan, northern California and Washington, D.C. Samples were then divided into six groups: food contact paper, like sandwich wrappers; noncontact paper, such as outer bags; food contact paperboard, like pizza boxes; paper cups; other beverage containers, such as milk cartons; and everything else, such as drink lids or applesauce containers.

Using the PIGE method, researchers found that of the 407 samples, 33 percent had detectable fluorine concentrations. Among food contact papers, detection frequencies ranged from 38 percent for sandwich and burger wrappers to about 57 percent for Tex-Mex food packaging and dessert and bread wrappers. Fluorine was more commonly found in grease-proof products than in beverage containers and products not intended for direct food contact. Overall, 46 percent of food contact papers and 20 percent of paperboard samples had detectable fluorine.

To help validate their findings — or to confirm that a positive result for fluorine is a reasonable proxy for PFASs — researchers then picked out a subset of 20 packaging samples to test for specific PFASs. They found that six of those samples had detectable levels of long-chain PFASs perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), even though U.S manufacturers had agreed in 2011 to stop using such substances for food contact via a U.S. Food and Drug Administration initiative. In general, researchers found that the subset testing supported the PIGE results, with samples that had tested high in fluorine also containing PFASs.

With results in hand, study authors reached out to the fast food restaurants with some questions. Co-authors Laurel Schaider, Simona Balan, Arlene Blum, David Andrews, Mark Strynar, Margaret Dickinson, David Lunderberg, Johnsie Lang and Peaslee write:

We attempted to investigate the fast food chains’ knowledge of their use of fluorinated food packaging. For each of the fast food chains that we sampled, we submitted questions through Web sites and by phone regarding company use, sourcing, and general policies on fluorinated products. Only two companies provided a substantive response: one stated that they believed none of their food packaging contained fluorinated chemicals, and the other stated that they verified with their suppliers that their food packaging did not contain PFASs. However, we found a substantial portion of fluorinated food contact papers from these two chains. While it is difficult to draw conclusions on the basis of so few responses, this suggests a lack of knowledge in the fast food industry about the use of fluorinated packaging.

The study also noted that while manufacturers did phase out certain PFASs of concern, alternative PFASs still pose an environmental and health risk, which is prompting researchers like Peaslee to call for reducing the use of highly fluorinated compounds and switching to nonfluorinated food packaging alternatives, like wax paper or aluminum foil. In fact, Peaslee said highly fluorinated compounds shouldn’t be used in products that go to landfills, as the chemicals don’t naturally degrade and end up accumulating in the environment as well as in people’s bodies. Indeed, a 2016 study found that drinking water sources for 6 million U.S. residents exceeded federal advisories for PFASs.

But back to fast food packaging — how dangerous is it to our health? According to Peaslee’s study, the extent to which PFASs from food packaging actually migrate into the food depends on a number of variables, such as the type of food, temperature of the food, and how long the food remains in the packaging. It’s also unclear as to how much food packaging is responsible for people’s dietary consumption of PFASs, though the study noted that children may be at heightened risk because they eat significant amounts of fast food and are more vulnerable to negative health impacts. Still, the study states that fast food packaging “can contribute to indirect dietary exposure via migration into food.”

And while no one likes to think of their food being wrapped up in harmful chemicals, Peaslee said the greater risk to human health comes after all those wrappers end up at the landfill, where PFASs can begin seeping into and building up in our soil and water.

“You won’t eat that wrapper, but you will be eating the chemicals off that wrapper when it degrades,” he told me.

Peaslee added that he’s not holding his breath for better chemical safety regulations when it comes to PFASs. Instead, he said consumers can use their voices and dollars to call on companies to stop using fluorinated products. He also noted that after his study hit the newsstands, several fast food companies contacted him to discuss the results.

“We shouldn’t ban this whole class of chemicals, but we should certainly use them sparingly,” Peaslee told me, noting that PFASs are still critical firefighting tools. “For consumers, look for the tag that says it doesn’t contain (perfluorinated chemicals). That will be the loudest voice you have.”

To download a full copy of the fast food study, visit Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years.

kkrisberg Fri, 02/24/2017 - 12:13

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 08:17:54 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes:

Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat exchangers — radiator-like devices, containing flammable hydrocarbons, that had been gummed up by residue and cleaned. Most of the workers didn’t need to be there; it was, for them, a training exercise.

Moore was monitoring the job by radio. “They were maybe two-thirds of the way to putting the bank online when I heard a noise from outside,” he said. “I felt a tremendous vibration in my feet,” followed by the whooshing sound of “a match hitting a barbecue.”

Exchanger E-6600E, part of a bank that had kept running while the other one was down, had come apart and disgorged hydrogen and a component of crude oil called naphtha, which ignited. Moore called each of the seven workers on the radio and got no response. Thirty or 40 seconds later he heard the strained voice of the crew’s foreman, Lew Janz. “Lew said, ‘Get someone up here. We’re all dying.’”

At the time of the Tesoro explosion, Michael Silverstein headed up the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries’ Division of Occupational Safety and Health. Morris reports:

The more Silverstein learned about what had happened at the refinery, the angrier he became. He was told about the troublesome heat-exchanger leaks during startup; workers routinely used steam lances to suppress flammable vapors. “It was unfathomable to me why Tesoro had decided to place workers in positions of known danger rather than making more expensive but definitive fixes to these leaking units,” Silverstein said.

He learned about a corrosion mechanism called high temperature hydrogen attack, or HTHA, which can cause tiny cracks in equipment, like the exchangers, subject to intense heat and pressure. He learned that the company hadn’t done the sorts of inspections required to find these micro-cracks, which can turn into bigger ones.

Silverstein was bothered in particular by a 1999 Tesoro document stating that it was “economically attractive” to push reactors and exchangers to their limits in older units. The document urged “very close control and monitoring of operating conditions, coupled with frequent inspection” under such circumstances.

Read the full investigative story, which is part of the center’s “Carbon Wars” series, at the Center for Public Integrity.

In other news:

Charleston Gazette-Mail: Ken Ward Jr. reports on the future of mine safety in the context of the incoming Trump administration. Joe Main, outgoing Mine Safety and Health Administration chief, said he’s concerned that complaints from the coal industry could encourage an erosion of safe working conditions, noting that he’s reaching out to industry officials to encourage them not to seek big changes to mine safety rules. On the flip side, Ward reported that Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, has said that mine safety changes enacted during the Obama administration should be reviewed by the incoming administration. Ward writes: “Last month, MSHA released updated data that it said showed an all-time low in the number of deaths and fatality rates in the mining industry. …MSHA says that mine safety ‘has been on a steady path to improvement’ since Main began instituting a variety of reforms after the April 5, 2010, explosion that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County.”

Atlantic Monthly: Lyndsey Gilpin reports on sexual harassment within the National Park Service, writing that since January 2016 when the Department of Interior released a report revealing that female employees at a Grand Canyon district had been sexually harassed for years, women working at parks and sites across the country have spoken up about harassment on the job. This year alone, more than 60 current and former Park Service workers contacted High Country News to discuss their sexual harassment experiences. Factors contributing to the problems, Gilpin reports, include a culture of “machismo” and a history of retaliation. Gilpin writes: “(T)he Park Service has allowed alleged perpetrators to retire, resign or be transferred to other parks. In 1998, Yellowstone Chief Ranger Dan Sholly was accused of sexual misconduct and transferred to a Florida park. This year, the superintendent of Canaveral National Seashore in Florida, who was in charge while employees were sexually harassed for years by a chief ranger, was put on a detail for the Southeast Regional Office and allowed to work from home.”

Slate: Anjali Kamat reports that more than three years after the deadly collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh killed more than 1,000 workers, those working in the nation’s apparel industry continue to face abusive and dangerous working conditions. Workers say that while the factory buildings may be safer, workers still have few rights. The story begins with Taslima Akta, a sewing operator at a factory called Windy Apparels, who died at work after supervisors ignored her complaints about feeling ill and refused to let her leave early. In speaking with Taslima’s colleagues, Kamat writes: “Many said supervisors had routinely denied requests for sick leave for anyone who wasn’t violently ill. One described a co-worker being warned she would be fired if she didn’t return from sick leave after a single day. None of them wanted me to use their names; they were all scared of losing their jobs. When I asked about the new safety regimes implemented after the Rana Plaza collapse, they didn’t want to talk about the structural improvements or the new fire safety measures. Taslima’s death had shattered their illusions of safety.”

Fair Warning: Myron Levin and Paul Feldman report on Exponent Inc., “a publicly traded giant in litigation defense and regulatory science” and a “go-to” source for industries with liability problems. A Fair Warning analysis revealed more than 1,850 peer-reviewed articles, letters and book chapters by Exponent scientists and engineers since 2000, with hundreds funded by corporations and trade groups on topics ranging from asbestos to chemical pollution. Levin and Feldman write: “Critics counter that this quest for truth leads down predictable paths. In his 2008 book, ‘Doubt is Their Product,’ David Michaels, now assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, criticized Exponent and several of its science-for-hire rivals. ‘While some might exist,’ Michaels wrote, ‘I have yet to see an Exponent study that does not support the conclusion needed by the corporation or trade association that is paying the bill.’”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years.

kkrisberg Tue, 12/20/2016 - 03:17

Tags

asbestos

black lung

Chemical facility safety

Doubt is their Product

Occup Health News Roundup

occupational fatalities

Occupational Health & Safety

OSHA

Public Health - General

Doubt is their Product

CDC: Health care workers report highest rates of asthma

kkrisberg — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:24:27 +0000

CDC: Health care workers report highest rates of asthma

More than 2 million U.S. adults may be living with workplace-related asthma, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Published this week in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the study is based on data from the 2013 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) industry and occupational module, which gathered information from 21 states for adults ages 18 and older who were employed or had been out of work for one year or less. Among the survey respondents, 7.7 percent had asthma, with researchers estimating that upward of 2.7 million adults might be living with asthma that was either caused by workplace exposures or had asthma exacerbated by workplace conditions. The BRFSS’ industry and occupational module was administered in 2013 for the first time in 19 states, and more than 208,000 adults across 21 states participated in the work-related module.

Overall, prevalence of asthma among workers ranged from 5 percent in Mississippi to 10 percent in Michigan, with the highest rates among workers in health care, health care support and social assistance. The state-specific analysis found that asthma prevalence was highest among workers in Massachusetts’ information industry, at 18 percent, and among health care support workers in Michigan, at more than 21 percent. Among the top five industries with the highest prevalence of asthma, health care and social assistance, retail trade and education were identified in a majority of states surveyed. Study co-authors Katelynn Dodd and Jacek Mazurek write:

Persons with work-related asthma have more symptomatic days, use more health care resources, and have lower quality of life. Moreover, asthma exacerbations accelerate decline in lung function. Each of the industries and occupations identified in this report is associated with a specific set of existing and emerging workplace exposures, including irritant chemicals, dusts, secondhand smoke, allergens, emotional stress, temperature, and physical exertion, that have been associated with new-onset and work-exacerbated asthma. For example, it is well recognized that workers in the health care and social assistance industry who are exposed to cleaning and disinfection products, powdered latex gloves, and aerosolized medications have a twofold-increased likelihood of new-onset asthma. A previous study reported that as much as 48% of adult asthma is caused or made worse by work; therefore, as many as 2.7 million workers might have asthma caused or exacerbated by workplace conditions in these 21 states.

Digging deeper into the details, the study found that among workers surveyed in the 21 states, asthma rates were nearly twice as high among women when compared to men, at 5.7 percent versus 10.2 percent. Current asthma was also highest among blacks, at 8.9 percent, followed by whites at 8.1 percent and Hispanics at 6.5 percent. Workers in the lowest household income category, at $15,000 or less, also reported the highest asthma rates. At the state level, Massachusetts, Michigan and Oregon were home to highest percentages of workers with asthma; Mississippi, Nebraska and Louisiana had the lowest.

When ranking industries, researchers found that health care and social assistance topped the list, with 10.7 percent of workers reporting current asthma. The five industries that followed were education, at 9.1 percent; arts, entertainment and recreation, at 9 percent; information, at 8.7 percent; retail trade, also at 8.7 percent; and finance and insurance, at 8.4 percent. When ranking according to occupation, health care support took the top spot, with 12.4 percent of workers reporting current asthma. The five occupations that followed were community and social services, at 12.2 percent; personal care and service, at 12.1 percent; arts, design, entertainment, sports and media, at 11.7 percent; office and administrative support, at 10.2 percent; and health care practitioners and technicians, at 9.2 percent.

The study also breaks down the percentage of workers who report asthma by industry and occupation within states. For example, in California, the industry with the highest rate of asthma is education, while the occupation with the highest rate is personal care and service.

“Potential work-related asthma exposure can be identified, and effective prevention and education strategies can be implemented,” the researchers write. “Routine collection of industry and occupation information is needed to estimate state-specific work-related asthma prevalence by respondents’ industry and occupation.”

According to OSHA, about 11 million U.S. workers face exposure to conditions related to occupational asthma, with workplace factors related to upwards of 15 percent of disabling asthma cases.

Read the full study at MMWR.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years.

kkrisberg Fri, 12/02/2016 - 12:24

I understand that nitrile gloves are still not good enough (you don't get enough tactile feedback) compared to latex for things like surgery, but why aren't all exam gloves nitrile?
And who on earth still uses gloves with latex powder, given the known risk of latex allergies?

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:33:03 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

Charles Ornstein at ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh at the Virginian-Pilot investigate the man known as Dr. Orange for his “fervent” defense against claims that exposures to Agent Orange sickened American veterans. A part of their long-running investigation “Reliving Agent Orange,” this most recent article reports that the Veterans Administration has repeatedly cited Dr. Orange’s (real name: Alvin Young) work to deny compensation to veterans, even though many argue Young’s work is compromised by inaccuracies, inconsistencies and omissions. In addition, the very chemical companies that make Agent Orange funded some of Young’s research.

Ornstein and Hixenbaugh write:

Decades after the last of the military’s Agent Orange was supposedly incinerated aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean, Army vet Steve House went public in 2011 with a surprising claim: He and five others had been ordered in 1978 to dig a large ditch at a U.S. base in South Korea and dump leaky 55-gallon drums, some labeled “Compound Orange,” in it. One broke open, splashing him with its contents. More than three decades later, House was suffering from diabetes and nerve damage in his hands and feet — ailments that researchers have associated with dioxin exposure.

Around the same time House came forward, other ailing vets recounted that they, too, had been exposed to Agent Orange on military bases in Okinawa, Japan.

The Pentagon turned to a familiar ally.

“I just heard back from Korea and the situation has ‘re-heated’ and they do want to get Dr. Young on contract,” one defense department official wrote to others in June 2011, according to internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot through the Freedom of Information Act.

By then, Young had established a second career. From his home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he and his son ran a sort of Agent Orange crisis management firm. His clients: the federal government and the herbicide’s makers — both worried about a new wave of claims.

Read the entire investigation at ProPublica.

In other news:

Charleston Gazette-Mail: Ken Ward Jr. reports that this week, a panel of federal judges grilled attorneys for former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who’s attempting to have his conviction for willfully violating federal mine safety laws overturned. An April 2010 explosion at the Massey-owned Upper Big Branch Mine resulted in the death of 29 miners. According to Ward, judges were especially tough on arguments Blankenship’s lawyer made that jurors were wrongly instructed on what constitutes a “willful” violation. He writes: “Several family members of miners who died at Upper Big Branch made the trip to watch, and a couple of rows of seats were filled with students on a tour to see the appeals court in action. Almost all of the argument was about the willfulness jury instruction, which was one of four issues Blankenship raised on appeal. …There was a very brief exchange toward the end of the hearing about a separate jury instruction that Blankenship’s lawyers argue wrongly defined 'reasonable doubt' for the jurors.”

PBS NewsHour (Associated Press): Kristin Wyatt reports that five more states will vote on raising the minimum wage in November: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Washington and South Dakota. Arizona, Colorado and Maine measures would phase in a $12 hourly wage by 2020; Washington voters will consider a $13.50 wage by 2020; and South Dakota will vote on keeping a newly lowered minimum wage of $7.50 for workers younger than 18 or requiring higher wages for all working teens. Arizona and Washington voters will also be casting ballots on paid sick leave. Wyatt writes: “Is it a slam dunk that this year’s measures will pass, too? Maybe. Even the classic opponents to a higher minimum wage — restaurant associations and small-business groups — are running muted campaigns to oppose the wage measures.”

Atlantic Monthly: James Hamblin writes about the role of night shift work in perpetuating health inequities, reporting on the health risks that studies have connected to night work as well as the risks that come with rotating shifts between day and night. His article was in response to a letter from a police officer who asked about the health risks of rotating night-day schedules verus working a consistent night schedule. Hamblin writes: “The actual best solution is to make a gradual transition between day shifts and nights shifts — like if you could start and finish ten minutes earlier every day. That would just be a nightmare for scheduling. And it’s a reminder that most people who have to work frequent night shifts aren’t in a position to be making demands like that. Night-shift jobs and their associated health risks tend to fall to people of lower socioeconomic status, so the risks of shift work tend to go ignored.”

EHS Today: Sandy Smith reports that provisions within OSHA’s new injury reporting rule that prohibit employers from discouraging such reporting have been delayed until Dec. 1. The anti-retaliation rules were originally supposed to go into effect in August. According to Smith, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas requested OSHA delay implementation to allow time for a motion challenging the rules. She writes: “Under the anti-retaliation protections in the rule, employers are required to inform workers of their right to report work-related injuries and illnesses without fear of retaliation; implement procedures for reporting injuries and illnesses that are reasonable and do not deter workers from reporting; and incorporate the existing statutory prohibition on retaliating against workers for reporting injuries and illnesses.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for nearly 15 years.

kkrisberg Wed, 10/26/2016 - 12:33

Tags