cmonforton | July 25, 2013The fourth largest city in the U.S. may be the next major metropolis taking action against wage theft. Members of Houston's City Council held a public hearing this week to discuss a proposed city ordinance targeted at employers who fail to pay the minimum wage or legally due overtime pay, force employees to work "off the clock," or simply skip out on paying owed wages. In Houston alone, an estimated $750 million are lost every year due to wage theft perpetrated against low-wage workers. The economic consequences for the victims and their families is profound, as is the potential effect on…
egrossman | July 24, 2013On July 15 and 16, about two dozen farmworkers paid an unprecedented visit to Capitol Hill to ask Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House to support increased protection from exposure to pesticides. Farmworkers have lobbied Congress before, but this is the first time such a visit focused entirely on pesticide exposure issues, explained Farmworker Justice director of occupational and environmental health, Virginia Ruiz. Farmworkers are asking Congress to support strengthening the EPA’s Worker Protection Standard for pesticides, a regulation that has not been…
cmonforton | July 23, 2013My mailbox today contained an example that Obamacare is working for healthcare consumers. In an envelope from my health insurance provider was a check for $124.08. The cover letter from Humana explained it was a rebate of a portion of my premium, as required by the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medical Loss Ratio standard.
Under the law, health insurers are required to report to HHS's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) how income from premium dollars are spent. (The first year of reporting was 2011 with the previous year's spending data.) For individual and small group plans…
lborkowski | July 22, 2013Many of us have been complaining about the heat that’s blanketed much of the country for the past couple of weeks, but the situation is especially severe for those who work outdoors or in spaces without adequate cooling.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the death of James Baldassarre, a 45-year-old postal worker who collapsed on the job and died in Massachusetts last week. Baldassare had worked for the US Postal Service for 24 years; his wife, Cathy, told WCVB News, “"I have a bunch of texts from Jimmy all day long, saying, 'I'm going to die out here today.…
kkrisberg | July 19, 2013When I asked Teresa Schnorr why we should be worried about the loss of a little-known occupational health data gathering program, she quoted a popular saying in the field of surveillance: "What gets counted, gets done."
Schnorr, who serves as director of the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations and Field Studies at CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), was referring to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program (ABLES), a state-based effort that collects and analyzes data on adult lead exposure. For more than two decades, NIOSH has been…
lborkowski | July 18, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The current issue of Mother Jones offers an article on the troubling and growing list of State "gag laws" which make it a crime to disclose contamination and abuse in animal breeding and slaughter houses. Ted Genoways in "Gagged by Big Ag," describes the events and players leading to:
laws (enacted in 8 states and introduced in 15 more) are viewed by many as undercutting—and even criminalizing—the exercise of First Amendment rights by investigative reporters and activists, whom the industry accuses of "animal and ecological terrorism."
A colleague alerted me to…
sgorman | July 17, 2013 Since 1994, when a Nigerian woman and her two daughters were granted asylum in the U.S. based on fear of female genital mutilation (FGM) in their native country, the legal community has been avidly debating the question of whether FGM should be considered grounds for asylum. A 1996 case, in re Kasinga, established a precedent for granting asylum to women based on a well-found fear of persecution in the form of FGM.
Today, the question is still, however, controversial. There is no standard definition of “persecution,” a fear of which is required for asylum seekers to gain asylum, and even…
cmonforton | July 16, 2013In its short history dating back to 1998, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has conducted more than 100 investigations of industrial chemical explosions, unplanned toxic releases, spills and other incidents. Some of the disasters made the headlines, such as the 2005 explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, TX which killed 15 workers, but others garnered much less public attention. Accompanying the CSB's investigation reports are detailed recommendations made to the companies involved, as well as trade associations, consensus standard-setting groups, unions, the US EPA and Occupational…
lborkowski | July 16, 2013In a recent opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press, David Fukuzawa of the Kresge Foundation suggests that improving the performance of Detroit's public school children requires tackling lead poisoning. Federal and state funds to prevent lead poisoning have dropped, and the millions of dollars spent to improve Detroit schools "cannot succeed without improving the public health of the city's children, especially young children." Reducing lead exposure can be costly and complicated, but the payoff is worth it.
Even though the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead paint in 1978, housing…
cmonforton | July 15, 2013[Update 1/21/2014 below]
Christopher Michael Cantu, 22, loved Tejano music and was proud of his Mexican heritage. His family says he was always happy, full of energy and a hard worker. Those are probably some of the qualities that helped him get a job in May at Coastal Plating Inc. in Corpus Christi, TX. But after just three days on the job, Cantu died from a fatal work-related injury. KIII TV reported:
"Cantu was killed when a piece of heavy equipment, a 2,600 pound metal tank, fell on him. ...Cantu's fellow employees rushed to his aid, but the tank he was working on was so massive,…
kkrisberg | July 12, 2013In a recent study comparing workers at industrial livestock operations and those employed at antibiotic-free livestock operations, researchers found that industrial workers were much more likely to carry livestock-associated strains of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly and scarily known as MRSA.
First, it's important to note that both groups of workers had a similar prevalence of S. aureus and methicillin-resistant S. Aureus (MRSA); however, it was overwhelmingly workers at industrial livestock operations, sometimes known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs,…
cmonforton | July 11, 2013"A worker's first day at work shouldn't be his last day on earth," was OSHA chief David Michaels' reaction to the work-related death of Lawrence Daquan "Day" Davis. The 21-year old was crushed in a palletizer machine on August 16, 2012 at the Bacardi Bottling facility in Jacksonville, FL. Davis was a temp worker hired by Remedy Intelligent Staffing. It was his first day on assignment to the Bacardi plant.
An OSHA inspection following the fatality resulted in citations against Bacardi for two willful and nine serious violations. Five of the violations, including those classified as willful…
egrossman | July 10, 2013Field studies conducted at hydraulic fracturing well sites by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in 2010 and 2011 found exposures to respirable crystalline silica well in excess of safety limits set by both NIOSH and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The NIOSH findings, released in April and May 2012, found 79% of air monitoring samples taken in personal breathing zones for silica exceeded the NIOSH recommended exposure level (REL) and 47% were greater than OSHA’s…
cmonforton | July 9, 2013A memorial service honoring the 19 firefighters killed in the Yarnell Hill, AZ wildfire will be held today at Tim's Toyota Center in Prescott Valley, AZ. Forty eight hours earlier, an honor guard escorted 19 hearses carrying members of the 20-person Granite Mountain Hotshots on a 125-mile route from Phoenix to Prescott. This string of somber ceremonies started Monday, July 1 when a crew of 12 firefighters were permitted on the mountain to remove the firefighters' bodies.
In "It's something you never want to see again," The (Arizona) Republic's Kristina Goetz describes a brotherhood of…
lborkowski | July 8, 2013Chemical Safety Board Chair Rafael Moure-Eraso testified before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee regarding its preliminary findings on the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people in April. Ramit Plushnick-Masti reports for the Associated Press:
"The safety of ammonium nitrate fertilizer storage falls under a patchwork of U.S. regulatory standards and guidance — a patchwork that has many large holes," according to the report presented to the panel by Rafael Moure-Eraso, the board's chairman.
The board, which has no regulatory authority, recommended in…
kkrisberg | July 5, 2013Last year, reported cases of West Nile virus in the United States hit their highest levels in nearly a decade. It's a good reminder to keep protecting yourself from getting bitten, but it also begs the question: Is this just a sign of a much bigger threat? The answer is just as wily as the pesky mosquito.
According to recent data published June 28 in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the federal public health agency received reports of 5,780 nationally notifiable arboviral disease cases in 2012. (Arboviral diseases are those transmitted by arthropods, such as ticks and mosquitoes…
cmonforton | July 3, 2013Is it unpatriotic to dread the Fourth of July? I wonder if some U.S. veterans do, in fact dread Independence Day because of the bottle rockets, shot missiles and other fireworks set off to mark the occasion.
NBC News contributor Bill Briggs wrote last year about Iraq War veteran Pete Chinnici, 26, who is "yanked backward in time to an unfriendly, unpredictable, violent land," when neighborhood kids play with firecrackers. Briggs quotes Dr. John Hart of the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas:
“Fireworks hit right in the heart of these causes [PTSD triggers.] Here’s…
lborkowski | July 3, 2013The Supreme Court's decisions on marriage equality and the Voting Rights Act got a lot of media attention last week, but several of the Court's other decisions also have implications for public health -- and they came down on the side of employers, real-estate developers, and drug manufacturers.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Georgetown University law professor David Cole warns, "the underlying theme of the Supreme Court’s term was not the recognition of rights, but their dilution." He points to two cases involving employment discrimination:
In a pair of less-noticed decisions released the day…
cmonforton | July 2, 2013Employers in British Columbia's (BC) construction industry recognized that workers were exposed to respirable silica and other rock dust. What they needed was a standard from the province's worker safety regulatory body on how to identify and control the hazard. The BC Construction Association, which represents 2,500 companies and the Council of Construction Associations (COCA) formally requested a standard on silica to fill the regulatory gap. In BC, worker safety regulations are proposed and adopted through their Workers' Compensation Board, part of WorkSafeBC. Earlier this month, the…
lborkowski | July 1, 2013Last week, the Senate confirmed Howard Shelanski to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), part of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the source of many lengthy delays of health and safety regulations. On Sunday, the New York Times published a scathing editorial about the backlog of draft rules at OIRA, stating, "The backlog has more to do with politics than economics ... It is as if the White House were still driven by election-year motives: defuse Republican taunts and placate industry." The editorial notes that 136 draft rules are under OIRA…