cmonforton | November 4, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). More than 12,000 researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the US and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s events courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
“Stop asking for a seat at the table…we belong at the head of the table": In April in Baltimore, after the civil unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray…
cmonforton | November 3, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Thousands of researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the U.S. and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s events courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
The tipping point: On our way to reducing gun violence: Public health advocates can agree that shootings are a huge health issue for the more than 33,000 victims of…
cmonforton | November 2, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Thousands of researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the US and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. As "the water cooler for the public health crowd," The Pump Handle is reporting from Chicago. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s event courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Standing with temp workers: Rainy weather didn't stop advocates who took to…
lborkowski | November 2, 2015The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has long been a key source of funding for medical research, but it wasn’t until 1986 that the agency formally established a policy of including women in clinical research. For decades, women received drugs and therapies that had been tested only on men, even though the same diseases can affect men and women differently, and women may metabolize drugs differently than men do.
In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act put into law the requirement for women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine reported, “women’s health…
kkrisberg | October 30, 2015When it comes to immunization rates in the United States, the story is a mixed one. Among children, we’ve absolutely excelled. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the nation’s childhood vaccination rate as one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. But when it comes to American adults — 50,000 of whom die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases — it’s a very different story.
Earlier this year, CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reported that uptake of recommended adult immunizations remains low and is far below Healthy…
cmonforton | October 30, 2015The criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship concluded its fourth week. Chris Blanchard the former president of Massey Energy’s Performance Coal Company was the prosecution's witness for the entire week. The Upper Big Branch mine was part of the Performance Coal Company subsidiary.
The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. provides updates several times a day from the federal courthouse. This week's featured a sparring match between the prosecution and defense attorneys over and about Blanchard’s testimony. Thanks to Ward’s reporting, I present some of my favorite exchanges from…
kkrisberg | October 28, 2015The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released the first nationally representative estimates of electronic cigarette use among U.S. adults, finding that more than 12 percent had ever tried the aerosol nicotine products in 2014. So, as is the unfortunate case with many emerging and potential public health threats, it seems like e-cigarette use is outpacing the ability of regulatory bodies to protect the public’s health and educate consumers about possible risks.
The new data is from CDC’s National Health Interview Survey, which first began collecting data on e-cigarette use…
cmonforton | October 27, 2015The anti-poverty group Oxfam America wants consumers to help poultry workers. Oxfam is calling on consumers to use their purchasing power to demand better working conditions for the 250,000 individuals who work in US poultry processing plants. The target of their demands? The four firms that control about 60 percent of the poultry market: Tyson, Pilgrim’s, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms.
“Consumers do have power,” explains Minor Sinclair, Director of Oxfam America’s US Program. Consumers have “…pushed through changes in antibiotic policies within the poultry industry. They’ve pushed through…
lborkowski | October 26, 2015The US spends far more on healthcare than other advanced countries, but we have worse health outcomes. Ideally, we could slow the growth of healthcare spending and improve outcomes by investing in prevention, creating incentives for providers to give high-value care, and eliminating care that’s unnecessary or harmful. While many of the efforts to achieve these goals involve arrangements between payers and providers, some also target consumers. However, as two recent pieces by Vox’s Sarah Kliff make clear, it’s hard to turn healthcare consumers into the kind of savvy shoppers who can contain…
kkrisberg | October 23, 2015When Mirella Nava began her new job at Rock Wool Manufacturing Company in Houston, Texas, she had no intentions of becoming an advocate for worker safety. But when she witnessed how fellow workers were being treated and the dangerous work conditions they faced on a daily basis, she felt compelled to speak up.
Eventually, Nava and a group of Rock Wool workers — with the help of the Houston-based Fe y Justicia Worker Center — got the attention of local OSHA officials, who earlier this year cited Rock Wool Manufacturing for seven serious and two repeat violations for exposing workers to a…
cmonforton | October 23, 2015The criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship went into its third week. Jurors heard testimony from Upper Big Branch (UBB) coal miners Stanley “Goose” Stewart, Richard “Smurf” Hutchens, and Scott Halstead, UBB superintendent Rick Hodge, and MSHA investigator Keith McElroy, among others. At the end of this third week of the trial, the 15 jurors have heard the testimony of 21 witnesses. Thanks to the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s Ken Ward Jr. and Joel Ebert, I can select and share some of my favorite quotes from this week's proceedings.
Performance Coal president Chris Blanchard,…
kkrisberg | October 22, 2015More good news from the Affordable Care Act: Since it became the law of the land, uninsurance disparities between white, black and Hispanic residents have narrowed significantly.
In a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs, researchers found that by the fourth quarter of 2014, the uninsurance rate for Hispanic adults had fallen to 31.8 percent from about 40 percent in the third quarter of 2013. During the same time period, uninsurance among black adults declined from 25.5 percent to 17.2 percent, while uninsurance among white adults fell from 14.8 percent to 10.5 percent.…
cmonforton | October 22, 2015Jeffrey Shannon’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, AECOM Technical Services dba Urs Corporation
The 49 year-old was working in March 2015 at Sunoco’s Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Delaware County, PA. The facility was being converted from an oil refinery to a natural gas storage and processing plant. AECOM was providing engineering and site preparation for Sunoco. The initial press reported indicated that Shannon was struck by a 1,200 foot pylon. I wrote about the incident shortly…
kkrisberg | October 21, 2015Flame retardants aren’t just found in your furniture. It’s likely you also have detectable amounts of the chemical in your body too, which is pretty worrisome considering the growing amount of research connecting flame retardants to serious health risks. Researchers have linked to the chemicals to reproductive health problems, adverse neurobehavioral development in kids, and endocrine and thyroid disruption. And so the question arises: Do the risks of today’s flame retardants outweigh the benefits?
Chemical engineer Christopher Ellison, an associate professor in the University of Texas-Austin…
cmonforton | October 20, 2015Kenneth Schultz, 56, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Tuesday, October 13 while working on a commercial construction project in Oceanside, CA. The Seaside Courier reports:
The construction site will be the site of a new FedEx distribution center.
The deceased worker “…was using a hand-held hydraulic machine to compact dirt in a drainage channel” at about 9 am local time.
A retaining wall “fell on him." It was a 3 X 12 foot slab of concrete.
NBC San Diego quotes a police spokesperson who said
"Workers moved a crane near the worker and lifted the cube off of him."
Construction of the $…
lborkowski | October 19, 2015A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times’ The Upshot: Yes, Soda Taxes Seem to Cut Soda Drinking
Mary McKenna at Germination: MRSA In Sports: Long-Standing, Simple to Prevent, Still Happening
Joe Fassler at The Atlantic: How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously
Sarah Kliff at Vox: This study is forcing economists to rethink high-deductible health insurance
Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog: ‘Everything is a workaround': Life in Obama’s agencies as Congress does nothing
Celeste wrote about this last week, but in case you missed it:…
cmonforton | October 16, 2015The second week of the criminal trial against former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship continued in Charleston, WV. The US attorneys called eight former employees to the witness stand. They included Blankenship’s executive assistant and five miners who worked at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine just prior to the April 2010 coal dust explosion that killed 29 workers. Transcripts of the trial are not publicly available, but the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. is providing daily recaps direct from the courtroom.
Ward reports, for example, on the testimony of one of the former UBB miners, Brent…
cmonforton | October 15, 2015“Ugh,” “argh,” or a moan. That's what I typically hear from injured workers when they describe their experience maneuvering the workers’ compensation (WC) system. The trouble runs the gamut from insurers refusing to authorize treatment by specialists (e.g., an orthopedist,) to insisting they return to work despite their own physicians’ opinions that doing so will cause more harm, to only being paid a portion of their lost wages.
Well, if workers have it bad under WC, an alternative system looks even worse. ProPublica’s Michael Grabell and National Public Radio’s Howard Berkes report on…
kkrisberg | October 14, 2015At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reporter Jeffrey Meitrodt authored an outstanding four-part series on one of the nation’s deadliest occupations: farm work. In “Tragic Harvest,” Meitrodt chronicles the impact of lax farmworker safety rules and the rise in worker fatalities in Minnesota. He begins his series with the story of farmworker Richard Rosetter:
Richard Rosetter stood inside his 28-foot grain bin and smashed a shovel into the thick layer of ice that covered his corn.
He was in a foul mood. His wife and a neighbor were pestering him, upset that he was working by himself, with no…
lborkowski | October 12, 2015Last week, District of Columbia Councilmembers David Grosso and Elissa Silverman, along with several colleagues, introduced the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015, which would establish the most generous system for paid leave within the US. It would allow covered DC workers to take up to 16 weeks of paid leave in a year, at full pay for those who make up to $52,000 annually, to address their own serious medical conditions, bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or deal with deployment-related issues. Emily Crockett of RH Reality Check explains the funding mechanism:
The…