lborkowski | October 16, 2013As Kim Krisberg reported earlier this year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition has found that in no state can full-time workers earning minimum wage afford the average rent for two-bedroom apartments without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The combination of rising rents and stagnating wages has left many families struggling to afford basic necessities, and unstable housing situations negatively affect health and children's school performance.
The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program allows low-income tenants to rent apartments and pay 30% of their income for…
cmonforton | October 15, 2013"Es ridículo,” was the reaction of a poultry plant worker when he heard of the USDA's proposal to "modernize" poultry slaughter. The agency's January 2012 proposal (77 Fed Reg 4408) would allow companies to increase assembly line speeds from about 90 to 175 birds per minute, and remove most USDA inspectors from the poultry processing line.
The Obama Administration should have heard the loud and clear opposition from civil rights, food safety, public health and the workers’ safety communities to the USDA’s proposal. When the public comment period closed in May 2012, the Southern Poverty Law…
lborkowski | October 14, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
A recent editorial in the New York Times, "Rolling the dice on food-borne illnesses," focused on just one of the many health dangers related to the federal government shutdown. The editorial reminded me of developments in Vermont almost forty years ago, when I was the State Health Commissioner.
Vermont's House Appropriations Committee was threatening to cut the Health Department's budget. After telling the Committee members that they would be hurting the Department’s ability to protect the public, including from foodborne and waterborne illness, I suggested…
kkrisberg | October 11, 2013Strategies to reduce the deathly toll of prescription drug abuse are reaping positive outcomes, though not every state is taking full advantage, according to a new report from Trust for America's Health.
Released earlier this week, "Prescription Drug Abuse: Strategies to Stop the Epidemic" found that 28 states and Washington, D.C., scored six or less out of 10 possible indicators of "promising strategies" to address prescription drug abuse, which has contributed to a startling rise in overdose deaths. Since 1999, such deaths have doubled in 29 states, four of which experienced a quadrupling…
lborkowski | October 10, 2013Over the course of three days, three miners were killed on the job in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wyoming. Ken Ward Jr. describes their deaths in the Charleston Gazette:
In the recent incidents, 62-year-old Roger R. King of Moundsville was killed Friday when he was hit in the head by part of a chain being used during a longwall machine move at CONSOL Energy's McElroy Mine in Marshall County.
On Saturday, a miner at Alliance Coal's Pattiki Mine in White County, Ill., was killed when an underground cart rolled over and he was pinned underneath it. Local media identified the miner as Robert…
cmonforton | October 9, 2013Who paid for the study? That's an important piece of information to have when considering a study's methods and reported findings. Financial ties are the most obvious conflicts of interest, but others include pre-publication review and other requirements imposed by a study’s sponsors.
Scientists publishing papers in the leading biomedical journals have, for at least ten years, been providing readers with disclosures of real or potential conflicts. The editors of more than 1,300 medical journals require authors to comply with specific disclosure policies. Researchers from other disciplines…
lborkowski | October 8, 2013The government shutdown has cut off the flow of funds from USDA to WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. Some states have enough money to keep their programs running for a while, but Utah's WIC clinic has already closed its doors to new clients as staff in the state are furloughed.
WIC serves approximately nine million low-income women and children. It provides vouchers for nutritious food (milk, cereal, vegetables, etc) and infant formula, counseling on healthy eating, breastfeeding support, and healthcare referrals. Zoë Neuberger and Robert…
cmonforton | October 7, 2013Steven O’Dell, 27, went to work on November 30, 2012 for his “hoot owl” shift at Alpha Natural Resources’ Pocahontas Coal Mine. He never came home. O’Dell was fatally crushed between two pieces of mobile mining equipment. Three weeks after his death, his wife Caitlin gave birth to their son Andrew.
The young widow wants to make sure that another miner’s family doesn’t have to suffer the pain and grief that she’s endured. As reported by The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward, Jr. Caitlin O’Dell spoke last week before the West Virginia Board of Coal Mine Health and Safety, urging them to…
kkrisberg | October 4, 2013While OSHA has never been the most robustly funded federal agency, its efforts and regulatory authority have helped prevent countless deaths, injuries and illnesses on the job. However, recent budget cuts and future budget cut proposals threaten those gains, and it's no stretch to say that worker health and safety hang in the balance.
In a report released in late August by the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch), author Nick Schwellenbach chronicled what austerity means for OSHA and the workers it protects. To first put the issue and impacts of slashed budgets in broader…
cmonforton | October 3, 2013It's been four months since Captain Bill Dowling responded with his fire station 68 crew to a multi-alarm blaze at the Southwest Inn in Houston. About 150 firefighters arrived on the scene to battle the rapidly-moving fire which started in a restaurant attached to the hotel. Disaster struck, and the May 31, 2013 incident stands as the Houston Fire Department's worst loss of life in its history.
Capt. Dowling and other firefighters from his unit were inside the building when its tile roof collapsed. Firefighters Robert Bebee, 41, Robert Garner, 29, Matthew Renaud, 35, and Anne Sullivan, 24…
cmonforton | October 2, 2013It's Day #2 of the Tea Party's shutdown of the federal government. Shuttered entrances to national parks and museums are immediate and visible signs of this idiocy. The shutdown's effect on key federal public health programs are probably less obvious, but could have substantially more adverse impact on the U.S. population. Superbug's Maryn McKenna wrote yesterday on just a few ways that interruptions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and USDA, could affect your's (and the world's) health. With just a few examples, McKenna captures the…
lborkowski | October 1, 2013Today is an exciting day in US healthcare history: For the first time, uninsured US residents can go online to shop for individual health insurance policies and feel confident of a few things: they can easily see information to make meaningful comparisons between plan options; they won’t be rejected or charged an astronomical rate based on their health history; and once they have a policy, they won’t be unpleasantly surprised by an omission of an essential benefit like hospital or maternity care.
In addition, insurance shoppers with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level…
egrossman | September 30, 2013The long-time residents of Iron County, Wisconsin who make up the Iron County Joint Impacts Mining Committee say the open-pit iron mine planned for the Penokee Hills of northern Wisconsin – a range that extends into Michigan where it’s known as the Gogebic Range – will bring much needed good jobs and economic development. Such jobs, the committee told a group of visiting journalists in August, have been lacking since the last Wisconsin iron mines in the area closed in the early and mid-1960s. The jobs the mine would bring are the type needed to keep local communities’ young people from moving…
lborkowski | September 27, 2013Last year, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights passed by the state's legislature. Yesterday, he signed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights that is watered down from its original version but takes the important step of extending overtime protections to nannies and other in-home employees. Domestic workers will earn overtime pay for working more than nine hours a day or 45 hours in a week (higher than the federal cutoff of 40 hours per week). The bill no longer contains the rest and meal breaks from the original version, and it will sunset after three years.…
lborkowski | September 27, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Brian Beutler in Salon: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot
Sarah Kliff, Sandhya Somashekhar, Lena H. Sun and Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post: How eight lives would be affected by the health law
Sendhil Mullainathan in the New York Times: The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less
Patricia Sagastume at Al Jazeera America: Dengue fever presence in Florida at a 'pretty serious level'
Alan Durning at DC Streetsblog: Apartment Blockers (about how the costs of underground parking contribute to high rents)
lborkowski | September 26, 2013A new Health Wonk Review compiled by Peggy Salvatore is now up at the Healthcare Talent Transformation blog. It's got links and descriptions for a great collection of posts on several healthcare topics, from health information technology and patient-experience reviews to the impact a government shutdown would have on Affordable Care Act implementation. (My post from last week, "Expanding Medicaid can improve birth outcomes," is included.)
One of the posts I found especially thought-provoking (and probably wouldn't have seen if not for the HWR link) is Vince Kuraitis's post "Healthcare…
cmonforton | September 25, 2013Earlier this month, the long-awaited, three-year delayed OSHA silica proposal was published. It's a proposed regulation designed to protect workers employed in construction, foundries, glassmaking, road building and other industries from silicosis, lung cancer and other silica-related diseases.
The proposal does not cover, however, some of the most heavily exposed workers in the U.S.: those employed in the mining industry. These are the workers who routinely drill, cut and load tons of quartz, some of whom work day after day in clouds of silica-laden dust. Protections for these workers…
lborkowski | September 24, 2013At the Center for Public Integrity, Sasha Chavkin has the latest news on a mystifying occupational health problem: chronic kidney disease (CKD) in young, previously healthy agricultural workers in Central America, India, and Sri Lanka. Since 2011, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has been following CKD in agricultural workers, which researchers estimate has killed 20,000 people in Central America alone.
Chavkin reports that El Salvador's Legislative Assembly has approved a ban on 53 agrochemicals (some of which have been banned for years in most other countries),…
cmonforton | September 23, 2013Reducing the risk of skin cancer and higher penalties for violence against emergency room personnel were addressed this year in Texas' legislative session. These public health topics not only received attention from lawmakers, they resulted in two new state laws which take effect this month.
Assaults and fatal injuries suffered by healthcare workers is a nationwide and global problem. The Emergency Nurses Association notes that the healthcare industry leads all others in the incidence of nonfatal occupational assaults. One recent study published in the Journal of Nursing Administration…
lborkowski | September 20, 2013Antibiotic-resistant infections kill 23,000 people in the US and sicken two million each year, and the problem is getting worse, warns a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2013 ranks several strains of bacteria according to their current and projected health and economic impacts. It describes 18 microorganisms whose threat levels are "urgent," "serious," or "concerning."
CDC identifies three bacteria as urgent threats: Clostridium difficile, Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and Drug-resistant…