lborkowski | February 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like "window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by."
Painter, a poultry inspector with the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) stationed in the northeast corner of Alabama in the town of Collinsville, is a first-hand witness to USDA's recently proposed rule to speed up poultry inspection lines while simultaneously reducing the number of federal food inspectors and turning over much of the food safety oversight to plant employees, who could have little…
lborkowski | February 18, 2013Last week, the Center for Public Integrity and PBS released a story that adds another disturbing chapter to the saga of hexavalent chromium (or chromium (VI)), the carcinogenic chemical compound behind the Erin Brockovich story. That story ended with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) paying millions to residents of Hinkley, California, where the company’s operations contaminated local water supplies. In “EPA unaware of industry ties on cancer review panel,” David Heath and Ronnie Green report that this time, the focus is on widespread, low-level chromium contamination; by the…
lborkowski | February 15, 2013One of the less-noticed provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that pharmaceutical companies report to the Department of Health and Human Services the gifts and other payments they give to doctors and teaching hospitals -- and that HHS in turn make that information available to the public. (It's sometimes referred to as the "Physician Payment Sunshine Act," after legislation previously introduced in Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley.) Earlier this month, HHS released its final regulations to implement this provision. Beginning August 1, 2013, drug and device companies will…
cmonforton | February 14, 2013Imagine an organization that is given 90 days to complete a task, but after two years still hasn't finished the job. When you ask them 'what's taking so long?' or 'when we'll you be done?' they respond with 'no comment.'
That's the frustrating situation encountered by the U.S. public health and worker safety community when it comes to the Obama Administration and a proposed rule to protect workers from respirable crystalline silica. The proposed regulation would potentially affect workers involved in stonecutting, sandblasting, tuckpointing, brickmaking, foundries, and road, tunnel and…
lborkowski | February 13, 2013This post is part of our Public Health Classics series. Sara Gorman is a frequent contributor to that series, and her Classics post on the Whitehall studies addresses a topic similar to today's subject: the influence of socioeconomic status on health.
By Sara Gorman
How much of a patient’s social context should physicians take into account? Is an examination of social factors contributing to disease part of the physician’s job description, or is the practice of medicine more strictly confined to treatment rather than prevention? In what ways should the physician incorporate public health,…
cmonforton | February 12, 2013It's one thing to say your agency is committed to environmental justice, but actions speak louder than words. That's why I'm eager to see how USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and his Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) respond to the environmental justice concerns raised about the agency's proposed regulation to "modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system" (77 Fed Reg 4408.)
A disproportionate share of workers employed in poultry slaughter and production are Latinos and women. Many earn poverty-level wages. Their work environment----which is already associated with adverse health…
lborkowski | February 11, 2013Celeste and I have an op-ed in the Washington Post's local opinion section about DC's paid sick leave law, which contains an exception that's especially problematic during flu season: it doesn't cover tipped restaurant workers. Read "Your meal shouldn't come with a side of the flu" at the Washington Post's site.
And if you want to eat at restaurants where workers have paid sick days (and other benefits many of us take for granted), check out the Restaurant Opportunities Center's 2013 Dining Guide, or download the accompanying iPhone or Android app for your city.
lborkowski | February 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
A couple years ago, two Johns Hopkins University public health researchers attended a public hearing about the possible expansion of an industrial food animal production facility. During the hearing, a community member stood up to say that if the expansion posed any hazards, the health department would surely be there to protect the people and alert them to any dangers. The two researchers knew that due to limited authority and resources, that probably wasn't the case.
"We felt like there was this false sense of comfort among the public," said Roni Neff, one of the two…
lborkowski | February 7, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Tim Dickson in Rolling Stone: The NRA vs. America
Tammie Smith of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Reporting on Health: Where you live determines how long you live
Leah Garces at Food Safety News: Why We Haven't Seen Inside a Broiler Chicken Factory Farm in a Decade (via this Superbug post, which has links to more related stories)
Charles Kenney at Small World (Businessweek): How the CIA is Hurting the Fight Against Polio
Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog (Washington Post): How Ohio's Republican governor sold the state on expanding Medicaid
cmonforton | February 6, 2013Greg Byers, 43, worked underground at Arch Coal/ICG's Pocahontas Coal Mine in Beckley, WV. On the afternoon of July 31, 2012, he suffered a serious crushing injury. He died later that day.
Byers was a U.S. Marine who'd been working as a coal miner for five years. His employment at the Pocahontas mine, which employs nearly 300 workers, began about a year earlier. His job was "scoop operator." He used a hefty vehicle to scoop up the loose coal from the mine floor after the mining machine had done its work. When there's no coal to scoop, the equipment operator is often given other tasks,…
lborkowski | February 5, 2013Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which many workers still rely on to assure that they can return to their jobs after taking unpaid time off for a new baby or to deal with a serious illness - their own or a family member's. But, NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports, 40% of the workforce is ineligible for the leave, including those working fewer than 25 hours per week with an employer (even if they have multiple part-time jobs), workers at businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and those who want to care for a family member who doesn't meet the official "…
cmonforton | February 4, 2013Leonel Perez put a human face on contingent workers in the U.S., during an interview with HuffPost Live's Jacob Soboroff. Perez is an immigrant farm worker from Imokolee, Florida. He explains the piece rate for picking tomatoes in the fields is about 50 cents for 32 pounds, a rate that hasn't changed in over 50 years. It's a poverty wage for an individual supporting himself, and worse yet for a farm worker who's trying to support a family.
The HuffPost interview also features University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor. She's president of the not-for-profit Center for Progressive…
lborkowski | February 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas may boast a booming construction sector, but a deeper look reveals an industry fraught with wage theft, payroll fraud, frighteningly lax safety standards, and preventable injury and death. In reality, worker advocates say such conditions are far from the exception — instead, they've become the norm.
Such conditions were chronicled in a new in-depth report released earlier this week. Researchers, who surveyed nearly 1,200 construction workers in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and El Paso, found that one in five construction workers experienced a workplace injury…
lborkowski | January 31, 2013In a New York Times Opinionator column, SUNY Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton traces the development of the US temporary-worker industry, which added more jobs than any other over the past three years. Temporary workers generally earn low wages and face job insecurity, and often lack benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and paid sick leave. Hatton explains that temp agencies offering such disappointing wage and benefits packages emerged in the years following World War II -- and did so despite the growing union power that characterized that era. They managed it, Hatton…
lborkowski | January 30, 2013In Wonkblog yesterday, Sarah Kliff highlighted an important aspect of immigration reform: Undocumented immigrants who gain legal status will also gain access to the Affordable Care Act’s options for getting health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ACA would reduce our nonelderly uninsured by 32 million, but 23 million people would remain without health insurance – and one-third of those people would be undocumented immigrants.
The ACA has two main mechanisms for offering affordable coverage to the uninsured: 1) expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all legal…
cmonforton | January 29, 2013[Updated below (6/24/2013)]
The Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson has a story today from the Kentucky coal fields that has my head shaking in disbelief. Reuben Shemwell, 32, says he was fired by Armstrong Coal after complaining about safety problems, including asphyxiation hazards and inappropriate respirators. As provided by the federal Mine Act (Section 105(c)), Shemwell filed a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department's MSHA for wrongful discharge. Now he finds himself being sued by his former employer in Kentucky state court. Armstrong Coal claims that Shemwell filed a "false…
cmonforton | January 28, 2013Could we have taken action earlier to prevent harm from tobacco, asbestos, and lead? That's the question at the core of the European Environment Agency's (EEA) collection of case studies, which was released this month as Volume 2 "Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation."
The publication features articles on those nefarious health hazards, as well as ones about beryllium, Bisphenol A, the pesticides DBCP and DDT, mercury, perchlorethylene, and vinyl chloride. Protecting ecosystem, including aquatic environments exposed to ethinyl oestradiol (synthetic estrogen used…
lborkowski | January 25, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to good health, America is far from top dog.
Yes, we may spend the most, we may have some of the most advanced medical technologies and we may produce some of the best doctors. But when it comes to the ultimate measure of a health care system's success — the health of people and populations — it seems we are losing a winnable battle.
"There's hardly anything more consequential than Americans dying earlier and being sicker," Dr. Steven Woolf, chair of the Institute of Medicine's and National Research Council's Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health…
lborkowski | January 24, 2013On April 5, 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia killed 29 miners. Four different investigative bodies reached the same conclusion about the causes of the blast: that mine owner Massey Energy disregarded fundamental safety practices while pursuing profit. (Celeste describes these findings and more in a post published on the second anniversary of the disaster.)
The office of US Attorney Booth Goodwin is prosecuting individuals they found to be involved in criminal mine safety violations at Upper Big Branch. The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr.…
cmonforton | January 23, 2013In the month's preceding the deadly explosion in April 2010 that killed 29 coal miners, Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine had racked up hundreds of serious violations of safety standards. In 2009 alone, this included 48 orders from federal mine inspectors to withdraw workers from the UBB mine because of dangerous conditions. But Massey knew how to game the system. Mine managers would make a couple tweaks, correct the immediate problem, and it was back to mining coal. usually within an hour or so. There was no real consequence for their or other mine operator's repeated…