lborkowski | May 1, 2014For the first time, the World Health Organization has examined antimicrobial resistance globally, and the grim findings won't be surprising to anyone who's been following this issue. (Last year, the US CDC and UK's Chief Medical Officer issued reports with similarly alarming warnings.) The WHO authors write in the report summary:
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an increasingly serious threat to global public health. AMR develops when a microorganism (bacteria, fungus, virus or parasite) no longer responds to a drug to which it was originally sensitive. This means that standard treatments no…
kkrisberg | April 30, 2014Climbing the corporate ladder is usually associated with promotions, salary raises and executive offices. But for many workers, the common metaphor is part of a real-life job description with real-life risks.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on occupational ladder falls, finding that a fifth — or 20 percent — of all fall injuries among workers involve a ladder. Among construction workers, 81 percent of all fall injuries treated in an emergency department involved a ladder (overall, falls are a leading cause of death in construction). In 2011, CDC…
cmonforton | April 29, 2014“When workers get hurt in poultry plants, many employers try to just throw them away,” explained Tom Fritzsche a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “Companies assume workers won’t stand up for themselves. We are proud to represent a group of brave workers who want to keep these dangerous conditions from harming even more people.”
Fritzsche’s comment came after SPLC filed a complaint last week with the Labor Department on behalf of nine poultry workers from Wayne Farms’ facility in Jack, Alabama. The complaint alleges the firm violated a slew of OSHA standards---from…
egrossman | April 28, 2014Today is Workers Memorial Day. This post discusses one of the thousands of occupational fatalities that occur every year around the world.
On Sunday, April 20th, Shayne Daye, a 27-year old electrician and technician, died as a result of an injury sustained while working at Suncor’s Oil Sands site about 15 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta in western Canada. Suncor is one of Canada’s largest energy companies and credits itself as the first company to develop Canada’s oil sands. Company spokesperson Sneh Seetal said Daye – who’d worked for Suncor for seven years – was working on an…
lborkowski | April 25, 2014Monday, April 28, is Worker Memorial Day, and groups around the US – and around the world – are holding events and issuing reports this week to remember workers killed on the job and push for stronger workplace protections.
For Workers Memorial Week 2014, National Council for Occupational safety and Health (National COSH) has released the 2014 edition of its report Preventable Deaths: The Tragedy of Workplace Fatalities. The report focuses special attention on occupational illnesses, citing silica exposures and high-risk populations, including Hispanic and contract workers. In addition to an…
lborkowski | April 25, 2014I've been writing a lot about the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, mainly from the perspective of Medicaid as a route to health insurance for low-income US residents. As a recent Wonkblog post from University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack reminded me, though, Medicaid is also an essential source of care for people who require long-term care -- or, in Medicaid language "long-term services and support (LTSS)" -- due to disabling conditions. When a person needs daily assistance with routine tasks, the costs can quickly eat up a family's income and savings, so Medicaid is a…
cmonforton | April 24, 2014Labor Secretary Tom Perez announced yesterday a new regulation designed to reduce coal miners’ risk of developing coal mine dust lung disease (CMDLD). I’ve written about these regulations many times, on both the need for them and the snail’s pace at which the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) reviewed them. They are long overdue.
Depending on who you ask these new regulations have been in the works since 2009 (beginning of the Obama Administration), 1996 (following an advisory committee report and NIOSH recommendation) or as far back as 1991 (following a…
lborkowski | April 23, 2014By Sara Satinsky
Should pregnant women who use drugs be charged as criminals or given help? From a public health perspective the choice is clear: provide treatment to help women quit drugs before their use harms their child.
Less than a year ago, Tennessee adopted a progressive policy to provide such treatment, but now is on the brink of taking a big step back. It could become the first state to criminalize pregnant women whose drug use harms a fetus or newborn baby.
The state legislature has passed a bill that, if signed by Gov. Bill Haslam, would authorize the filing of criminal assault…
cmonforton | April 22, 2014[Updated: 3 hours after I posted it. See below]
Black lung----now referred to by experts as coal mine dust lung disease (CMDLD)--- was back in the news last week courtesy of the Pulitzer Prize. The Center for Public Integrity’s Chris Hamby received the prestigious recognition for his reporting on the steep hurdles faced by coal miners who seek black lung disability compensation. Hamby's piece focused on the back end of the problem. On the front end is preventing CMDLD in the first place. Coal miners wouldn’t have to maneuver the legal obstacle course for disability benefits if CMDLD became a…
lborkowski | April 21, 2014April 2010 saw two major workplace disasters: The April 5th explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where 29 workers lost their lives, and the April 20th explosion at the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers. Four years later, Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette reminded us that "for those who lost loved ones, April 5 is now forever the day that they became a widow or an orphan, the day they lost their son or their best friend." He posted the names of the 29 miners and a slideshow memorial about them at his Coal Tattoo blog.
The BP Deepwater Horizon…
kkrisberg | April 18, 2014Women aren’t the only ones at risk for depression and in need of screening services when a new baby comes into their lives. Young fathers face significant mental health challenges as well, according to a new study.
Published in the May issue of Pediatrics, researchers found that fathers who live in the same households as their children experience a decrease in depressive symptoms in the period immediately before their children are born. However, depressive symptoms among young fathers, who were around 25 years old when they became fathers, increased an average of 68 percent throughout their…
cmonforton | April 17, 2014Going to a job and getting paid appropriately for your time is how it is supposed to work. Doing your job and getting ripped off by not getting paid is wrong and illegal. The economic consequences of wage theft for the victims and their families are profound: the threat and reality of losing utilities, food and housing. One of the single biggest risk factors for ill health is poverty. That makes wage theft a public health problem.
But catching and punishing employer-thieves is difficult. The federal and state enforcement agencies are under resourced and the laws weak. It’s also one thing to…
lborkowski | April 16, 2014The list of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners announced earlier this week includes several journalists whose award-winning work addresses public health issues.
The Boston Globe Staff won the Breaking News prize for “exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.” Among the many articles in the Globe’s extensive coverage of the April 15, 2013 attack and its aftermath are pieces on the first responders, hospital workers, and therapists who…
cmonforton | April 15, 2014I often find myself trying to reconcile a company’s description of its safety program with what I hear from workers. One worker I met summed it up this way:
“Yeah, we have safety talks, but a talk is where it ends. It’s all talk, not real action on safety problems.”
Two recent incidents brought his remark back to life for me. It started with a recent news release from OSHA. The agency announced a proposed penalty of $50,600 to Grede Wisconsin Subsidiaries LLC at the firm’s Browntown, Wisconsin iron foundry. Funny thing is, the firm was touting its safety record last month at OSHA’s public…
lborkowski | April 14, 2014The Washington Post's After the Wars series offers an in-depth look at the challenges facing veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. This past week, it's featured Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "The Other Wounds," about veterans' injuries and illnesses that aren't the direct results of enemy attacks, and Stephanie McCrummen's "The Choice," about one of the difficult decisions facing survivors of military sexual assault.
An unprecedented release of Medicare data has allowed for a lot of reporting on how much Medicare pays physicians; Puneet Kollipara rounds up several articles in Wonbook. Two…
kkrisberg | April 11, 2014Unfortunately, it’s not too terribly surprising that diseases of the developing world don’t attract as much research attention as diseases common in wealthier countries. However, a new study not only underscores that trend, it actually found zero relationship between global disease burden and health research.
Designed to identify the reasons behind global health research disparities, the study compared the global disease burden (defined as healthy life years lost to disease or disability) of 111 diseases against relevant research articles using data from the World Health Organization and the…
cmonforton | April 10, 2014The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is one of those federal agencies that lies quietly in the background. It’s not one for making waves. It's more like bench scientist who minds her own business in the laboratory. But this week, NIOSH blew its top and created some waves.
In a pointed letter to the head of the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), NIOSH director John Howard, MD, said that FSIS was misinterpreting a NIOSH report released last month. The report presents the findings of a NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) performed at a Pilgrim’s Pride…
lborkowski | April 9, 2014The World Health Organization has released a new estimate of the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution: In 2012, approximately seven million deaths -- one in eight of those occurring worldwide -- resulted from exposure to air pollution. The vast majority of these deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries, with much of the burden falling in South East Asia and the Western Pacific.
This report deals separately with deaths from indoor and outdoor air pollution, although of course many people are exposed to both forms. Indoor, or household, air pollution comes mainly from…
cmonforton | April 8, 2014The photos rolled across the screen. Photos of construction workers tuck-pointing the cement grout on a building, sawing brick, jack hammering a sidewalk, sanding drywall. Each photo, showing workers in clouds of dust, illustrated the multitude of ways they are exposed, and why they are at risk of silica-related diseases.
The scrolling photo exhibit was the backdrop for testimony provided by representatives of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) on the final day of OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed silica regulation. The LHSFNA is a joint labor-management…
lborkowski | April 7, 2014At an appearance at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida last month, President Obama spoke about how the problems of stagnant wages and inadequate paid leave affect women workers:
Today, more women are their family’s main breadwinner than ever before. But on average, women are still earning just 77 cents on every dollar that a man does. Women with college degrees may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career than a man at the same educational level. And that’s wrong. This isn’t 1958, it’s 2014. That’s why the first bill I signed into law was called the…