sgorman | June 22, 2015It seems simple enough – a proliferation of donors in global health means more money to solve some of the world’s most pressing health issues. Right? Not exactly. A lot of new evidence is coming out that suggests that the lack of coordination of different funding sources can be a burden and perhaps a detriment to global health. And the way that traditional funders think about the locus of health spending in countries to which they donate may not even be entirely accurate. As a recent report from the Center for Global Development In fact, as the report finds, most funding for health is…
kkrisberg | June 19, 2015Even though farmworkers face serious hazards on the job and work in one of the most dangerous industries in the country, most young farmworkers in a recent study rated their work safety climate as “poor.” In fact, more than a third of those surveyed said their managers were only interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible.
Recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study was designed to capture perceptions of work safety climates on North Carolina farms that employ children and teens and the association with occupational safety and injuries. In partnering…
cmonforton | June 18, 2015The discussion and debate continues this week about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), TPA (Trade Promotion Authority (fast-track authority)) and TAA (Trade Adjustment Assistance.) Just today, House Republicans (along with 28 Democrats) voted to give President Obama the fast-track authority he desperately wants for the TPP trade agreement.
Over the last few months, I’ve heard plenty on NPR and read plenty in the Washington Post about TPP, TPA and TAA. I didn’t expect, however, to see any of the acronyms appear in a medical journal. But the New England Journal of Medicine surprised me by…
kkrisberg | June 16, 2015A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times.
Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports:
“This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…
cmonforton | June 15, 2015Richard Johnson’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) in the agency’s citations against his employer, Southwest Fabrication. The 31 year-old was working in January 2015 at the company’s facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The initial press reports indicated that his clothes got entangled in a metal fabrication machine. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with ADOSH conducted an inspection at the facility following the fatal incident. The agency…
lborkowski | June 15, 2015Last week, Oregon's Senate and House passed a bill that requires businesses with 10 or more employees to let them earn up to 40 hours of paid sick time each year. Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill, which would make her state the fourth in the nation mandating paid sick days. Connecticut was the first state to pass a paid-sick-days law, in 2011, and California's legislature followed in 2014. In Massachusetts, advocates introduced a ballot proposal on earned sick time, and the state's voters approved it in the 2014 election.
The original version of Oregon's bill would have…
kkrisberg | June 12, 2015The science on the health effects of fracking is still very much emerging. Oftentimes, the growing body of research can’t make a conclusive link between the drilling technique and negative health impacts, but it certainly makes the case that more research is needed. Earlier this month, another study joined the pack.
Published June 3 in the journal PLOS ONE, the study found that women who lived closer to a high density of fracking activity were more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther away from such drilling activity. The study is the first of its kind to…
cmonforton | June 11, 2015John Dunnivant’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, Kia Motors. The 57-year old was working in October 2014 at the company’s plant in West Point, Georgia. The initial press reports indicated that Dunnivant was crushed by a stamping machine in the steel-press section of the facility. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with federal OSHA conducted an inspection at the facility following the fatal incident. The agency recently issued citations…
kkrisberg | June 10, 2015“All response is local” is a commonly heard phrase among public health practitioners who serve on the front lines of disease outbreaks, emergencies and disasters.
Whether it’s a measles outbreak, a terrorist attack or a hurricane, public health agencies are at the ready to deploy an emergency response infrastructure designed for one overriding purpose: to protect their communities against preventable disease and injury. That kind of preparedness takes an enormous amount of planning, training, practice and collaboration. It also requires sustained funding support — something that’s all too…
lborkowski | June 9, 2015By Dan Neal
Ensuring that U.S. workers return home from work healthy and in one piece requires pushing OSHA and other agencies to do more at the state and national levels to improve standards and aggressively enforce them. Meanwhile, health and safety advocates and workers must speak out loudly for worker rights, especially to protect workers who simply report safety problems at their jobs and to protect whistleblowers who reveal criminal behavior.
Those points were discussed last week in Baltimore at the 2015 National Conference on Worker Safety and Health. More than 280 workplace safety and…
lborkowski | June 8, 2015A 68-year-old South Korean man recently returned from a multi-country trip to the Middle East developed a cough and fever. He visited four health facilities before being diagnosed with MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and in the process spread the virus to several more people. Now, 50 people in South Korea have been diagnosed with MERS, and four have died. Two of the patients are healthcare workers.
MERS is a viral respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and characterized by fever, cough, and shortness of breath; it was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. It has…
kkrisberg | June 5, 2015Back in 1970 when the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established, local policymakers could choose whether or not to extend OSHA protections to state employees. Unfortunately, Massachusetts took a pass. But decades later — and after years of advocacy, organizing and research on the part of worker advocates — employees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can now look forward to safer and healthier workplaces.
In June 2014, then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed legislation that expanded OSHA protections to executive branch employees — that’s more than 150,000…
lborkowski | June 4, 2015Fifty years ago, on June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court issued the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which struck down a Connecticut law that criminalized the encouragement or use of contraception. Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, the organization’s medical director, had been arrested and fined $100 each for providing contraceptive advice to married persons. In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled in their favor, finding that Connecticut’s law prohibiting contraception violated the right to marital privacy. In 1972, in…
cmonforton | June 3, 2015I’m getting tired of Members of Congress describing Obama’s Executive Order (EO 13673) for government contractors “blacklisting.” Merriam-Webster defines blacklisting as “ a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted." The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “to decide that you will not do business with an organization or person.”
That’s not at all what the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplace" Executive Order says and it’s not what is described in the guidance document to implement it. That guidance document was published in the Federal Register on May 28.
Yet the…
kkrisberg | June 2, 2015Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help.
Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
cmonforton | May 29, 2015The Labor Department released last week its semi-annual regulatory agenda and it’s full of disappointment for those expecting new worker safety regulations from the Obama Administration. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) doesn't expect to publish a proposed rule to protect mine workers from respirable silica until April 2016. Six months ago, the agency suggested the proposal was imminent. OSHA doesn't expect to convene a panel of small businesses to review a draft proposed rule to address combustible dust until February 2016. A year ago the agency said it would be ready for…
kkrisberg | May 29, 2015Another day, another study that finds poverty is linked to adverse and often preventable health outcomes. This time, it’s vision loss.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new data finding that poverty is significantly correlated with severe vision loss, which is defined as being blind or having serious difficulties seeing even with glasses. In examining data from the American Community Survey, researchers found that among counties in the top quartile for severe vision loss, more than 55 percent were also in the top quartile for poverty. The South is home to…
cmonforton | May 28, 2015Factory farms in the US---the confinements that house millions of beef cattle, dairy cows, hogs and poultry--- generate enough manure to fill the 102-story Empire State Building each and every day. That's more than 13 times the sewage produced by the US population.
This factoid and many others are presented in Factory Farm Nation 2015, a report released this week by Food & Water Watch (FWW). The report describes the dominance of factory farms in US agriculture and its affect on the physical, economic, and social environment. It provides examples of consolidation within the beef, pork,…
kkrisberg | May 27, 2015For more than a decade, biologist Mariam Barlow has been working on the theory that administering antibiotics on a rotating basis could be a solution to antibiotic resistance. After years of research, Barlow had lots of data, but she needed a more precise way to make sense of it all — something that was so specific it could easily be used to treat patients. So, she joined forces with a team of mathematicians. And the amazing results could help solve an enormous, worldwide problem.
In a nutshell, the team of biologists and mathematicians developed a software program that generates a road map…
kkrisberg | May 26, 2015After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she doesn’t do the job alone — she always works with at least one other person, so they can help each other with much of the lifting and other types of repetitive physical labor that can often lead to preventable injuries and…