lborkowski | July 13, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care.
We have a food problem.
But food cost money. So for some…
lborkowski | July 12, 2012I wrote last week about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act, and Stacey Singer of The Palm Beach Post has just published a piece that shows how important sunshine laws can be for public health. Singer revealed that Florida is in the midst of tuberculosis outbreak that's claimed 13 lives and sickened at least 99 people, six of them children. Another 3,000 people may have been exposed to the bacterium through close contact with contagious sufferers. "Fortunately, only a few of the cases have developed drug resistance so far," Singer reports.
State health officials explained that…
cmonforton | July 11, 2012When the deal was made five years ago, officials were proud to announce it was the first refinery expansion project in the U.S. in 30 years. Motiva Enterprises' CEO Bill Welte called it a "momentous occasion" for his firm and its owners Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco. The final product would be the largest refinery in U.S. It was projected to produce more than 12 million gallons of gasoline per day from crude oil shipped initially by tankers from Saudi Arabia to the Port Arthur, TX site.
Fast forward to the grand opening ceremony on May 31, 2012 where five executives including Shell's…
lborkowski | July 10, 2012For the New York Times' Well blog, Pauline W. Chen, MD writes of a nurse who kept working despite feeling a slight twinge in her lower back, reasoning that her patients would suffer if she weren't at work. And her story's not unusual, Chen reports:
Nurses make up the largest group of health care providers in the United States, working in venues as varied as doctors’ offices and biotech firms, governmental agencies and private insurers. Trusted more than almost any other professional, nurses exert a wide-ranging influence on how health care is delivered and defined.
But nurses’ work is not…
lborkowski | July 9, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren't members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country.
The workers reported multiple problems with the ExxonMobil subcontractor who hired them, including not being paid on time, not having enough water on site and no access to medical care in the event of an…
cmonforton | July 9, 2012If it wasn't such a terrible disgrace, an example of our malfunctioning regulatory system, and a public health failure, I'd have to pinch myself that three of my favorite investigative reporters have worked together to expose it. Ken Ward, Jr. of the Charleston (WV) Gazette, Jim Morris of the Center for Public Integrity (and rising star Chris Hamby) and Howard Berkes of National Public Radio (NPR) have teamed up to write about black lung disease among U.S. coal miners. The first of their stories were reported yesterday in the Gazette and at Hard Labor, the Center for Public Integrity's…
lborkowski | July 6, 2012By Anthony Robbins
On 19 June, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and other Federal agencies and private sector groups concerned with worker health convened a two-day workshop at the Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building in Washington. About 100 researchers gathered to discuss how workers compensation data could be analyzed and used to study worker safety and health. NIOSH asked me to moderate the first session. I was flattered, but for all my roles in public health since leaving NIOSH’s directorship in 1981, I was surely not an expert in workers’ compensation…
cmonforton | July 5, 2012"Regulation in an uncertain world," was the title of a speech that President Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein delivered on June 20, 2012 at a National Academy of Science's government-university-industry research roundtable on "Decision Making under Risk and Uncertainty." Mr. Sunstein's speech, as prepared for delivery, tried to make the case that under his leadership at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) the Administration has instituted new procedures and practices that make the federal regulatory system more rigorous, evidence based, and transparent…
lborkowski | July 4, 2012While the adoption of the Declaration of Independence is the most important anniversary that the US celebrates on July 4th, this date is also the anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act. President Johnson signed the FOIA on July 4, 1966 – although he apparently wasn’t happy about it, and refused to hold a signing ceremony.
The National Security Archive -- which is not a government agency, but a nonprofit based at the George Washington University (where I work) -- looked back at the history of FOIA on its 40th anniversary in 2006, and reported:
Documents from the LBJ Library show that…
cmonforton | July 3, 2012[Updated (July 5, 2012) below]
"We're still in the dark," explained one family whose son was killed 27 months ago at Alpha Natural Resources (formerly Massey Energy's) Upper Big Branch mine (UBB). That comment came two weeks ago after learning that Alpha, one of the world's largest coal companies, provided its first progress report to U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin as required by the December 2011 Non-Prosecution Agreement. The report was dated June 4, 2012. The progress report is supposed to describe the firm's compliance with the agreement, which settled the U.S. Department of Justice's…
lborkowski | July 2, 2012Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters has posted the second of two parts in the special edition of Health Wonk Review responding to the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act: Part I is here, and Part II is here.
I'm delighted with the Court's decision to uphold the law as a whole, but concerned about its making the Medicaid expansion optional. One Slate article and two posts on the Health Affairs Blog (one of which was included in Part I of the special-edition HWR) are especially helpful in thinking about the Medicaid aspect of the decision:
Darshak Sanghavi explains in Slate that…
lborkowski | June 29, 2012There's been a lot of great analysis and commentary since the Supreme Court issued its decision on the Affordable Care Act yesterday. Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters is graciously hosting a special edition of Health Wonk Review -- check it out a variety of takes on the legal, economic, and healthcare implications of the decision.
On the topic of states now getting to choose whether or not to participate in the Medicaid expansion, Sarah Kliff talks to Matt Salo, director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, about how states will think through their options and runs some of the…
lborkowski | June 28, 2012As Kim has already reported, public health advocates are delighted that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act. The law takes important steps toward improving the way we pay for care and invest in prevention, but its most important achievement is in reforming the bizarre US health-insurance system, whose reliance on voluntary employer-sponsored coverage has resulted in millions of people lacking health insurance. By deciding that the law’s Medicaid expansion is optional for states, though, the Court is leaving the fate of 16 million low-income people up in the air.
The ACA…
lborkowski | June 28, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For me, there were few better places to hear about today's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act and its individual insurance mandate than at a meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Here in Charlotte, N.C., for APHA's Midyear Meeting, I was surrounded by hundreds of public health practitioners, researchers and advocates as we all watched the magnified scroll of Scotusblog.com, anxiously waiting for the decision.
At 10:08 a.m., the blog declared: "The individual mandate survives as a tax."
That was when the cheers (and tears) began. You…
cmonforton | June 28, 2012Just two weeks ago, families of the 29 men who were killed on April 5, 2010 at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine traveled to Washington DC to urge lawmakers to improve our nation's mine safety law. The West Virginia natives met with Republican and Democratic Members of Congress and asked for four simple reforms targeted at the mining industry's bad actors. They weren't asking anything for themselves. Only for new laws to help deter unscrupulous employers from causing another disaster and causing other communities to suffer the same pain and loss the UBB families have endured.…
cmonforton | June 27, 2012It's not the first time that Kenneth Rosenman, MD has provided scientific evidence on the deficiencies in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual survey of occupational injuries and illnesses, and it won't be the last. His latest study, written with Joanna Kica, MPA, with Michigan State University's (MSU) Department of Medicine ,reports that the Labor Department's methods for estimating work-related burns misses about 70% of them. Their analysis focused on cases occurring in the State of Michigan in 2009. The MSU researchers used data from the State's 134 acute-care hospital, which…
lborkowski | June 26, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Just a few years ago in Butte County, Calif., it wasn't unusual for public health workers to administer more than 1,000 free HIV tests every year. In true public health fashion, they'd bring screening services to the people, setting up in neighborhoods, parks and bars, at special community events and visiting the local drug treatment facility and jail. The goal was prevention and education, and no one got turned away.
That was before 2009, which is when California state legislators cut millions in HIV prevention and education funds from the state budget. The cut meant that…
lborkowski | June 25, 2012This month, Environmental Health News has been running a fantastic series of stories in a series entitled “Pollution, Poverty, People of Color.” The editors planned the publication around the 30th anniversary of protests in Warren County, North Carolina, which are widely credited with launching the environmental justice movement. In 1982, residents of Warren County -- a predominantly black, low-income area -- learned that the state was planning to build a hazardous-waste landfill there to hold thousands of cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil. Activists Deborah Ferruccio and Reverend Willie T…
egrossman | June 22, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
In response to results of the recently released National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) field studies that found workers at hydraulic fracturing operations exposed to high levels of respirable crystalline silica, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and NIOSH have issued a Hazard Alert. The alert outlines the health hazards associated with hydraulic fracturing and focuses specifically on exposures to airborne silica, saying that “employers must ensure that workers are properly protected from overexposure to silica.” It also…
cmonforton | June 21, 2012It's been almost two years since Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr, 38, went to work at Barrick Goldstrike's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada, but never made it back home to their families. They were fatally crushed on August 12, 2010 in a mine shaft by tons of falling aggregate and pipe. As I wrote last year, management at this mine --- an operation owned by the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of tens of billions of dollars --- had jerry-rigged a reset button with a broom handle and failed to replace missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate…