lborkowski | November 27, 2012By David Ozonoff
Annual Reports from governmental bodies aren’t often significant, much less classic, public health documents. By design they are confined to summaries of an agency’s work over a year’s time and they often don’t even appear until two or more years later. Such was the case for the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories in Great Britain for the year 1947, which didn’t appear until 1949. Its author was the Chief Inspector himself, a pioneer in occupational health by the name of E. R. A. Merewether.
Originally a general practitioner, Merewether found his way into public…
lborkowski | November 26, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's often said that hard work never hurt anybody. It's a cliché with which occupational health folks and thousands of injured workers would undoubtedly disagree. And while tragic and often preventable physical injuries may be the easiest to see and document, other work-related health risks are much harder to pick up on. One such risk is depression.
Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky, as such research is often based on self-reporting methods that can leave…
cmonforton | November 21, 2012It's become a Thanksgiving tradition: The President of the United States appearing in the White House Rose Garden to pardon a live turkey so the bird is spared from being part of the feast. This year, the Obama White House really got into the tradition. They created a Facebook page to allow all of us to decide whether a 40 pound turkey named Cobbler or one named Gobbler would forever avoid the butcher's knife.
But, this silly PR stunt isn't fooling food safety advocates. Cobbler and Gobbler were donated by the corporate giant Cargill from a grower in Rockingham County, Virginia. These two…
cmonforton | November 20, 2012
Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place. In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said:
"Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger."
In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added:
"Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers. When rulemaking takes years and even…
lborkowski | November 19, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle's Public Health Classics series.
By Sara Gorman
Does cigarette smoking cause cancer? Does eating specific foods or working in certain locations cause diseases? Although we have determined beyond doubt that cigarette smoking causes cancer, questions of disease causality still challenge us because it is never a simple matter to distinguish mere association between two factors from an actual causal relationship between them. In an address to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill attempted to codify the criteria for determining…
lborkowski | November 16, 2012This is the second in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. (The first post is here.) The series will explore the science and policy of balancing the need for treatment as well as the need to prevent abuse and diversion. This week's story looks at clinical efforts to reduce the risk of opioid abuse and overdose while still caring for patients; the next story will explore the role of public health officials in curbing opioid abuse.
by Kim Krisberg
Since…
lborkowski | November 15, 2012My fellow blogger Celeste Monforton has been working for the past several months with the Houston worker center Fe y Justicia to respond to outrageous employer behavior that exposed construction workers to asbestos and raised questions about how the city selects contractors. Earlier this week, Jeremy Rogalski and his investigative team colleagues at KHOU 11 News released a news story documenting what occurred.
Last summer, a heat wave and drought in Texas dried out the soil so much that underground voids put pressure on Houston's aging water pipes. Six hundred water mains broke, creating an…
lborkowski | November 14, 2012This week is Get Smart About Antibiotics Week, and CDC is promoting awareness about when these important drugs should and shouldn't be used. Overuse of antibiotics speeds the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and infections from these bacteria are much harder to treat.
Many of our readers are probably already familiar with CDC's message, which boils down to the fact that antibiotics don't cure viral infections (colds, flu, most bronchitis) and the reminder that when you are prescribed antibiotics, you need take the entire course of drugs rather than stopping once you feel better.…
Worker loses scalp in unguarded machine, her first week on-the-job, employer contests OSHA violation
cmonforton | November 13, 2012In late July, David Moye of the Huffington Post reported on a horrific incident at JR Engineering of Barberton, Ohio in which Monica Thayer, 25, was pulled by the hair into a piece of machinery.
"She was in the Barberton factory cleaning a machine that cuts steel tubing when her long brown hair, which was pulled back, got caught and yanked her face first into the device. 'My biggest fear was that I would be moments away from getting rescued, and then it would start-up and kill me,' she said in a report that aired on Fox affiliate WDAF-TV. 'The next thing I realized, it had sucked me up and…
lborkowski | November 12, 2012It's fitting that the US dedicates a day each year to honoring veterans, but ensuring that veterans get the care and services they merit is year-round work. In recent years, we've seen the federal government increase recognition of, and resources for, the mental health conditions that many veterans suffer from. Yet, as US Representative and combat veteran Charlie Rangel points out in a USA Today column, we haven't done enough:
In the United States, suicide has become the seventh leading cause of death for men and the fifteenth for women. Every year, there are nearly a million suicide attempts…
lborkowski | November 9, 2012by Kim Krisberg
This is the first in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. The series will explore the science and policy of balancing the need for treatment as well as the need to prevent abuse and diversion. This week's story provides a look at the field of pain medicine and the patients it cares for; next week's story will look at the educational and risk reduction approaches physicians are employing to address opioid addiction and overdose.
It took…
lborkowski | November 8, 2012Cleanup and recovery from Sandy's devastation is a daunting task, and presents several hazards. Laura Walter at EHS Today describes several hazards in the cleanup work and ways to avoid them. The hazards include musculoskeletal injuries from lifting heavy watersoaked items, contaminated standing water, mold and mildew, electrical wires, and stress. An OSHA Hurricane Sandy Cleanup and Recovery page offers detailed fact sheets and quick cards on these and other hazards, with most offered in both English and Spanish.
Stephen Lee reports in Bloomberg BNA that labor and business groups have…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
egrossman | November 6, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
A new study has been added to the growing body of literature reporting on the potential health effects of low-level exposure to widely used pesticides. In this study, a pesticide (triflumizole, or TFZ) used on leafy greens, apples, cherries, strawberries, cucumbers, grapes, watermelons, and other food crops has been identified as an obesogen in mice. An obesogen is a chemical that promotes obesity by prompting the growth of more and larger fat cells, often doing so through prenatal exposure and setting the stage for metabolic disease later in life.
Since the…
cmonforton | November 5, 2012At last week's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting its Governing Council adopted about a dozen new policies to guide the Association's advocacy activities. Over APHA's 140 year history, these resolutions have covered a variety of public health topics, from the 1950 policy supporting fluoridation of public water supplies, the 1960 policy supporting compulsory pasteurization of milk, the 1969 policy calling for American forces to be withdrawn from Vietnam, to the 1982 policy condemning the apartheid policy of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, and the 2009…
cmonforton | November 2, 2012I was eight years old on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" was the slogan for us kids. When we'd see a newscast with factory stacks spewing thick gray smoke we'd say "yuck." We'd hold our noses when tailpipes of junker cars belched exhaust. In our minds, air pollution was a bad thing because of what we could see and smell. We sure didn't think about it as something that was cutting short people's lives.
One of the first prospective U.S. studies to demonstrate an association between air pollutants and premature mortality was published in the New England…
lborkowski | November 1, 2012It was easy to miss with all of the Sandy coverage, but an article by John M. Broder in Sunday's New York Times gives some of the wrenching details about teenage boys dying in grain bins. Broder begins with the story of Tommy Osier:
STERLING, Mich. — Tommy Osier, 18, a popular but indifferent student, was still a year from graduating from high school, and that was no sure thing. Farm work paid him $7.40 an hour, taught him discipline and gave him new skills. He had begun talking about making a life in farming.
But he hated the chore he drew on Memorial Day of last year, working inside the…
lborkowski | October 31, 2012Things are mostly back to normal in DC today: Schools and government offices are open, trains and buses are running on their usual schedules, and there are few outward signs that Hurricane (or Superstorm) Sandy passed through here less than 48 hours ago. The situation is apparently far worse in New York and New Jersey, where flooding damaged millions of homes and hundreds of miles of subway tunnels. Millions of people from the Carolinas to Maine lost power, and many are still without it. The US death toll has reached 40.
With Election Day less than a week away, Hurricane Sandy reminds us how…
lborkowski | October 30, 2012As Sandy's high winds and water subside, many of us are feeling profoundly grateful to the emergency responders who've been putting themselves in harm's way to keep the rest of us safe. Although their jobs by definition involve working in hazardous situations, there's a lot their agencies and incident commanders can do to protect response workers. Earlier this year, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health released the Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance (ERHMS) system, which provides guidelines for protecting emergency responders in a wide variety of…
lborkowski | October 30, 2012The American Public Health Association's annual meeting is taking place this week in San Francisco, with the theme of "Prevention and Wellness Across the Life Span." If you're not there (or if you're there but can't possibly attend all the sessions you want to), the APHA Meeting Blog is a great way to get a taste of the research and ideas being discussed.
Among the annual meeting bloggers is Kim Krisberg, a regular Pump Handle contributor. She covered the meeting's opening session, which featured APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, UnitedHealth’s Reed Tuckson, House Minority Leader…