kkrisberg | August 18, 2015The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is no stranger to budget cuts — the agency is already so underfunded that it would take its inspectors nearly a century, on average, to visit every U.S. workplace at least once. In some states, it would take two centuries. Unfortunately, appropriations bills now making their way through Congress don’t bode much better for OSHA.
Earlier this month, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) and Public Citizen, along with 74 fellow organizations that care about worker health and safety, sent a letter to…
lborkowski | August 17, 2015The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics has published an early release of findings on US health insurance coverage from January - March 2015, and the numbers show a continued decline in the number of US residents without health insurance. The report presents findings from the National Health Insurance Survey, and the headline estimate is that just 9.2% of people (29 million) were uninsured at the time of the interview. That's down from the same time period last year, when 13.4% lacked insurance coverage.
The report notes that since 2010, the decline in uninsurance among adults ages 18…
lborkowski | August 15, 2015Beginning on Labor Day 2012, we have published a yearbook on U.S. occupational health and safety. Here are the links to each year's report:
Yearbook 2017
Yearbook 2016
Yearbook 2015
Yearbook 2014
Yearbook 2013
Yearbook 2012
kkrisberg | August 13, 2015A Republican-led plan to ban unions at the Internal Revenue Service could leave agency workers without union representation and make all federal unions susceptible to similar tactics, according to Joe Davidson writing in the Washington Post.
Davidson reports that the plan, which was released earlier this month, was included in a bipartisan report on accusations of political interference at the IRS, though no evidence was presented that union members took part in political favoritism. The anti-union proposal, put forth by Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, came just days before…
cmonforton | August 12, 2015“It’s just like the paper we read in class.” That was the email message I received last week from a former undergraduate student from a class I used to teach called "Health and the Environment." She was referring to a report of two young children from the Cincinnati, OH area who were lead poisoned because the toxic metal wasn’t controlled at their father’s workplace. He worked at a facility that recycles electronic waste (e-scrap.)
My former student read about the case in the July 17, 2015 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The 2 year-old girl and 1 year-old…
kkrisberg | August 11, 2015One of the big criticisms that opponents of the Affordable Care Act love to trot out is its impact on the economy — one phrase you often hear is “job killer.” In fact, in 2011, Republicans in the House actually introduced legislation officially titled “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” That bill didn’t make it far. However, a new report finds that “job-killing” isn’t just hyperbole; it’s just plain wrong.
Earlier this month, the Urban Institute released a new report on the ACA and employment, asking “Has the ACA been a job killer?” Authors Bowen Garrett and Robert Kaestner noted…
lborkowski | August 10, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Barbara Ehrenreich at the Guardian: In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty
Victor Yocco at Vox: What it’s like to be a recovering alcoholic in an office where booze is everywhere
Mary McKenna at Germination: CDC to Congress: Raise our Budget or Americans Will Die Needlessly
Liz Szabo and Laura Ungar at USA TODAY: Family planning budgets in crisis before Planned Parenthood controversy
Gabriel Metcalfe at Citylab: What’s the Matter with San Francisco? (“The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed…
cmonforton | August 7, 2015My husband and I (along with our 70 pound golden retriever) recently spent 26 hours in our car driving from Texas to Michigan. That’s lots of time to kibitz on all sorts of topics.
He heard me rant about four workers killed on the job last fall at DuPont’s LaPorte, TX plant because of gross safety violations. At the same time, the corporate giant earns millions selling its safety “expertise” to other companies. My husband heard me repeat my complaints about the small financial sanctions imposed on companies for violating fundamental safety regulations, even in cases of a worker's death. The…
cmonforton | August 6, 2015OSHA announced today that it is proposing a health standard to protect workers who are exposed to beryllium. Exposure to the lightweight but super strong metal causes a debilitating illness called chronic beryllium disease (CBD) and lung cancer.
The proposed rule is coming about, in part, because of an effort by those who will be most affected by an OSHA beryllium regulation: the nation’s primary beryllium manufacturer, Materion, and the United Steelworkers (USW). They engaged in two years of negotiations to agree on key provisions of a regulation. In February 2012, they submitted their…
cmonforton | August 4, 2015Ascencion Molina Medina, 44, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Thursday, July 30, 2015 while working at a construction site in Greenville, SC. Greenville On-line reports:
Medina “lost his footing” and fell about 30 feet, according to the county coroner. He died several hours later at the local hospital.
The construction project is a new mixed use development called Main + Stone which will house residential and retail properties. The Beach Company is the developer and the project broke ground in late 2014.
The general contractor of the Main + Stone development is Yeargin Potter Shackelford…
lborkowski | August 3, 2015Last week, Nigeria met an important milestone: An entire year without a reported case of polio. If the WHO confirms the absence of the virus in samples taken from people in previously affected areas, Nigeria will no longer be on the list of countries where the disease is endemic. Another two years will have to pass without additional cases before the WHO can certify Nigeria -- and possibly the entire continent of Africa -- as polio-free.
India was in a similar position a few years ago: In 2012, it was removed from the list of polio-endemic countries, and the WHO declared it polio-free in 2014…
kkrisberg | July 31, 2015Superstorm Sandy came ashore nearly three years ago, pummeling the New England and Mid-Atlantic coast and becoming one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the U.S. This week, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study released two new reports finding that the health impacts of Sandy continue to linger, illustrating the deep mental footprint left by catastrophic disasters and the challenges of long-term recovery.
Led by researchers at Rutgers University and New York University, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study is based on 1,000 face-to-face interviews with adults in the nine…
lborkowski | July 30, 2015On July 30th, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Social Security Amendment Act that created Medicare and Medicaid. At the signing ceremony, President Johnson enrolled President Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and gave a speech on the importance of the legislation. The President’s description of the law’s impact describes the conditions it aimed to alleviate:
No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy…
cmonforton | July 29, 2015Timothy Winding’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 KCI Inc and Ford Motor Company. The 50 year-old was working in December 2014 at the Ford Motor Company’s Kansas City assembly plant in Claycomo, MO, when he was killed on the job.
The initial press reports indicated that Winding was part of a crew of contractors who were working to retool the plant for a new line of Ford trucks. While working on a body marriage machine, a safety rod broke and Winding was crushed. I wrote about the…
kkrisberg | July 28, 2015Thousands of foreign workers in the U.S. — workers here legally through a visa program that allows employers to import workers from abroad — are abused, imprisoned and exploited. And the government does little to stop it, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed News. Reporters Jessica Garrison and Ken Besinger and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine began their investigation with the story of Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez, two H-2 visa workers who peeled crawfish at L.T. West Inc. in Louisiana, where they say their employer took away their passports, sexually harassed them, forced them to…
cmonforton | July 27, 2015[Updated below (8/3/15)]
The occupational health community, coal miners, their families and labor advocates are mourning the loss of physician Donald Rasmussen, 87.
For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic. A lengthy story by John Blankenship in Beckley’s Register-Herald written two years ago profiled Dr. Rasmussen’s career.
“ In 1962, a young doctor from Manassa, Colorado, saw a help wanted advertisement in a medical journal needing doctors in…
kkrisberg | July 24, 2015Technically, the recession is over. So it may come as a surprise to learn that more U.S. children are living in poverty right now than during the Great Recession. To be more specific: About 1.7 million more children live in low-income working families than just a few years ago.
The new and troubling numbers come from the 2015 Kids Count Data Book, which was released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation earlier this week. The book measures four domains of child well-being in the post-recession years: economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. It also ranks states by overall…
cmonforton | July 23, 2015[Updated 7/24/15 below]
I heard very troubling remarks yesterday from a member of the Chemical Safety Board. Mr. Manny Ehrlich said that he has a “fundamental philosophical disagreement” with the staff about making recommendations for new safety regulations. Mr. Ehrlich accepted a job and was confirmed by the Senate to make recommendations to prevent catastrophic chemical incidents. Now he tells us that he is taking an entire category of fixes off the table?
The Chemical Safety Board is modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). I know I’d be concerned if I heard members…
cmonforton | July 22, 2015A physician from the Houston area taught me a new phrase: “Code Silver.” Dr. Stella Fitzgibbons had an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman yesterday about assaults and other violence in US hospitals to healthcare workers. She begins:
“You’ve been waiting in your hospital bed for pain medicine or some ice water, and are starting to get cranky about the nurse’s delay. Then you find out that it happened because another patient tried to strangle her with her stethoscope. Or you hear ‘Code Silver’ on the overhead speakers, and a nursing assistant comes in, wedges the door shut, and helps you…
kkrisberg | July 21, 2015Because there can never be enough research to illustrate the positive impact of public health policy on people’s health, here’s another one. This one found that comprehensive smoke-free indoor air laws resulted in a lower risk of asthma symptoms and fewer asthma-related doctor’s visits.
Based on 2007–2011 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, researchers set out to evaluate whether comprehensive statewide indoor smoking bans are effective in reducing secondhand smoke exposure among nonsmoking U.S. adults. (Comprehensive smoking bans are defined as eliminating smoking in…