kkrisberg | April 4, 2014When Brian Castrucci sees signs up at local retailers offering discounts to police officers and firefighters, he thinks: Why not public health too?
“How do we better brand ourselves as those who protect and serve,” asks Castrucci, chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation, which supports a variety of projects aimed at strengthening the nation’s public health system. “I’ve never been a victim of crime, but I still value the police. I’ve never had a fire in my home, but I still value the fire department. …I want people to value prevention. I want people to know (public…
cmonforton | April 3, 2014You’d think the man responsible for the death of 29 coal miners would show remorse and not subject us to his opinions. Nope. That’s not what we should ever expect from Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy.
Four years ago this coming Saturday, April 5, will mark the 4th anniversary of the coal dust explosion that killed 29 workers at the Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine. Blankenship thinks it is appropriate to mark the anniversary with his propaganda. Blankenship hired Adroit Films of Chesapeake, VA to produce a documentary called “Upper Big Branch – Never Again.” It…
cmonforton | April 2, 2014That simple phrase “No dust, no silica,” was the way that Donald Hulk characterized his firm’s attitude about controlling respirable crystalline silica.
Hulk is the corporate safety director for Manafort Brothers based in Plainville, CT. His presentation was one of the highlights during last week’s nearly 40 hours of testimony. The other memorable moment came from six workers who traveled from Houston, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia to speak personally about working in silica dust. Their participation interjected a dose of reality. More below about their testimony.
Manafort’s Don Hulk…
lborkowski | April 1, 2014Yesterday was the end of the first open enrollment period for people buying private health insurance plans on the federal and state-run health insurance exchanges. President Obama announced today that more than seven million people enrolled in private plans, helped by a surge of signups in the few days before the deadline. Many of these enrollees (those with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level) were able to get subsidies to decrease their premium costs.
Severe technical problems plagued Healthcare.gov -- the federally run site where residents of states not creating…
egrossman | March 31, 2014In a February 11th news bulletin, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) expressed concern “about the alarming increase in preventable injuries and fatalities at communication tower worksites,” and announced it was “increasing its focus on tower safety.” At that point, five weeks into 2014, cell tower work had caused four occupational fatalities for the year – the deaths of three cell tower workers and of one fire fighter. Now, just over a month later, three more cell tower workers have died on the job. On March 19th, a 21-year old from Maryland was killed while working…
kkrisberg | March 28, 2014This year’s County Health Rankings once again illustrate why geography and good health go hand-in-hand. They’re also a poignant reminder that there may be no better way to improve health for all than by focusing on the social determinants of health.
Released earlier this week, the 2014 County Health Rankings compare each state’s counties on 29 factors that impact health, from tobacco use to high school graduation rates to access to healthy food choices. In examining the differences between counties, the report found that the least healthy counties were home to twice the premature death rate,…
lborkowski | March 27, 2014Our regular readers are well aware of the hazards faced by workers in the US poultry industry (as well as related industries processing other meats), and of the USDA's misguided poultry-inspection proposal that would allow for increased line speeds in US poultry plants. Workers, public-health experts, and other advocates have been urging US agencies to address the conditions that leave meat-processing workers with appallingly high rates of musculoskeletal disorders and other health problems, and have found the response disappointing. So, three organizations -- the Midwest Coalition for Human…
cmonforton | March 26, 2014Yep. “We’re not stupid” was just one of the many memorable moments at last week’s public hearing on OSHA’s proposed rule on respirable crystalline silica. The remark came from epidemiologist Robert Park of CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He was compelled to respond to a comment made by Tony Cox, a consultant retained by the American Chemistry Council.
Cox, who was expounding on the OSHA’s peer-reviewed risk assessment, asserted that the agency has not demonstrated a causal link between silica and lung disease at OSHA’s proposed permissible exposure limit…
lborkowski | March 25, 2014By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
I am surely not an expert on cholera. I have never seen a patient with the disease. And I have never been to Haiti. Yet I keep reading about the epidemic in Haiti. The first case reports appeared in October 2010, about 10 months after the powerful earthquake that shook Haiti. Unrepaired damage to hospitals, clinics, and roads made it difficult to bring oral rehydration to patients with cholera. The country lacked potable water and infrastructure to treat human fecal waste. By 2014, at least 700,000 Haitians had been infected and more than 8000 had died. The…
kkrisberg | March 24, 2014Thanks to a unanimous vote of California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board last Thursday, workers get to hold on to a robust chemical right-to-know rule that puts their health and safety first. The vote also means that California workers will reap the benefits of more meaningful right-to-know rules than those at the federal level.
“It’s a human right to know about the hazards of the work you’re doing,” said Dorothy Wigmore, occupational health specialist at Worksafe, a state-based organization dedicated to eliminating workplace hazards. “If employers don’t know about the…
lborkowski | March 21, 2014Tomorrow, March 22nd, is World Water Day, and this year's theme is Water and Energy. UN's World Water Day website explains why:
Water and energy are closely interlinked and interdependent. Energy generation and transmission requires utilization of water resources, particularly for hydroelectric, nuclear, and thermal energy sources.
Conversely, about 8% of the global energy generation is used for pumping, treating and transporting water to various consumers. In 2014, the UN is bringing its attention to the water-energy nexus, particularly addressing inequities, especially for the 'bottom…
lborkowski | March 20, 2014On Tuesday, more than 40 activists were arrested while protesting Georgia Governor Nathan Deal's refusal to accept the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Janel Davis and Chris Joyner write in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Dr. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor, was among those placed in handcuffs by Georgia State Patrol troopers. Warnock and a group of supporters staged a sit-in outside of Deal’s office Tuesday afternoon. They were arrested without incident and led away as the remaining crowd of protesters sang “We Shall Not…
cmonforton | March 19, 2014[Update below]
What would it take to get police departments to refrain from calling work-related fatalities “just an accident”? I read it all the time. A 60 year-old mechanic falls 50 feet through an unguarded floor opening, and it’s an “accidental death.” Or a 30 year-old production clerk gets pulled into a machine, and it’s a “tragic accident.”
The latest example I read involved a 23 year-old man, Erik Deighton, who was crushed a few weeks ago at Colonial Plastics. The small suburban Detroit manufacturing plant fabricates specialty parts for automakers. Shelby Township Police Captain…
lborkowski | March 18, 2014Three years after Japan's earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, concerns persist about health effects while the cleanup poses ongoing health and safety challenges.
Living on Earth reports on a lawsuit filed by several US Navy sailors against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The sailors were part of a relief operation, and their ship sailed into a plume of radioactive dust. Their attorney, Charles Bonner, told Living on Earth that many sailors are now suffering from “leukemias, ulcers, brain tumors, testicular cancers, dysfunctional uterine bleeding,…
cmonforton | March 17, 2014This week will mark the next big step in efforts to institute a federal regulation to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Tuesday, March 18 will be the first of 14 days of testimony and debate about a proposed silica rule which was released in September 2013 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA). The “deadly dust” is associated with malignant and non-malignant respiratory diseases and other adverse health conditions. The hazard has been recognized for centuries, but the U.S. does not have a comprehensive rule on the books to protect the…
kkrisberg | March 14, 2014It’s not the first study to examine the enormous health and economic benefits of vaccines. But it’s certainly another impressive reminder about the power — and value — of prevention.
In a study published online earlier this month in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that childhood immunizations among babies born in 2009 will prevent 42,000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, saving the nation $13.5 billion in directs costs (medical costs and disease outbreak control) and more than $68 billion in total societal costs (premature death and lost productivity). That means that…
lborkowski | March 13, 2014The latest issue of the Journal of Public Health Policy includes an interesting piece by Linda Richter and Susan E. Foster of the organization CASAColumbia about "changing the language of addiction." (The journal is open access during the month of March; the home page is here.) They note that while the science of addiction has advanced, outdated public attitudes about it persist and interfere with effective treatment. Surveys have found adults, and even many physicians, to consider alcohol addiction to be at least partially a personal or moral weakness. Stigmatizing addiction can interfere…
kkrisberg | March 12, 2014When President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law in 2011, it was described as the most sweeping reform of the nation’s food safety laws in nearly a century. Public health advocates hailed the law for shifting regulatory authority from reaction to prevention. What received less attention was a first-of-its-kind provision that protects workers who expose food safety lawbreakers.
The law’s whistleblower provision, also known as Section 402, amends the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to provide “protection to employees against retaliation by an entity engaged in…
egrossman | March 11, 2014“The United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis,” Chemical Safety Board Chairperson Rafael Moure-Eraso told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on March 6th. He spoke at hearing held to discuss President Obama’s August 2013 Executive Order on chemical facility safety, which Obama issued following the catastrophic incidents at the West, Texas fertilizer plant and Louisiana petrochemical facilities. In the wake of the Freedom Industries chemical release in West Virginia, improving the nation’s chemical safety has taken on a new urgency. Yet while the Senate…
cmonforton | March 10, 2014It started with a yawn. Then a conversation about whether daylight savings time (DST) begins too early in the year. "On Monday, kids will be going to school in the dark and with one hour less sleep," said my mom. My brother remarked: “There are more accidents in the days immediately following the time change.” I was skeptical about his car accident remark, but didn’t want to open my mouth without some facts. Here’s some of what I learned with just a minute of searching on PubMed.
Researchers with Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences assembled data from U.S. fatal automobile…