lborkowski | April 6, 2012At an American Public Health Association annual meeting session a couple of years ago, I learned from the panelists that green jobs aren't always safe jobs -- for instance, energy-efficient buildings and wind turbines can be designed without proper consideration for how workers constructing or servicing them will be protected from falls or assured adequate ventilation in confined spaces. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's Prevention Through Design program is addressing these issues and others related to green jobs, but there's still a lot of progress to be made.…
cmonforton | April 5, 2012"When the world came to an end" is how Joshua Williams described being inside the Upper Big Branch coal mine at 3:02 pm on April 5, 2010. He knew several crews of coal miners were much deeper inside the dark tunnels than he. An ominous feeling. Coal dust explosions are powerful and deadly. Eight days later, after all the worker-victims were removed from the mine, the death toll was 29.
What's happened in the two years since the disaster? Here's a brief recap:
Eighty-four mine workers at other U.S. mining operations have been killed on-the-job since the April 2010 Upper Big Branch…
lborkowski | April 4, 2012Deborah Sontag's New York Times piece "Haiti's Cholera Outraced the Experts and Tainted the UN" is a reminder that while public attention to the earthquake-ravaged country has waned, cholera still presents a major threat to the country's people. It's also just a sad story about how one apparently small malfunction can have disastrous consequences for an entire nation.
The UN's independent experts concluded that the strain of cholera now afflicting Haitians had come from South Asia, and originated in the tributary behind a base used by Nepalese UN peacekeeiping troops, most likely from a…
cmonforton | April 3, 2012[Update below, June 2013]
Phillip Northmore worked for the UK's Ministry of Defense in Plymouth, England from 1963 to 1966. His job as a lagger meant he spent his day repairing and applying asbestos insulation around pipes and ductwork in the bowels of buildings. His wife recalled him coming home from work covered in dust. It would take three washings to get his work clothes clean because the water would turn white from the thick dust.
Debbie "Muvmuv" Brewer is Phillip Northmore's eldest daughter. She was a pre-schooler when her dad worked as a lagger. Four decades later in 2006, Northmore…
lborkowski | April 2, 2012This week (April 2-8) is National Public Health Week. As Kim Krisberg described a couple of weeks ago, localities and groups across the country are recognizing it with a wide range of activities, from a health film festival to a safe sex carnival to a 1950s-themed health fair featuring the jitterbug and hula hoops. (Go here to find an event in your area.) This year, the American Public Health Association (which has organized National Public Health Week since 1995) has made the week's theme "A Healthier American Begins Today: Join the Movement!" The NPHW website explains the theme's…
lborkowski | March 30, 2012Unless they've deviated from their normal procedure, the Supreme Court justices have now decided on how they'll rule on the Affordable Care Act - but, as the Washington Post's Robert Barnes points out, we'll have to wait until late June to hear their verdict. In the meantime, this is a good opportunity to recap the key issues in the case and highlight some of the more insightful commentary about them.
The first issue on which the Court heard arguments was whether it could rule on this case to begin with, since it involves a tax on people who don't have health insurance coverage (or a hardship…
lborkowski | March 29, 2012by Kim Krisberg
A couple weeks ago on the southern-most tip of the continental United States in Key West, nearly 70 residents gathered at a town hall meeting to talk about mosquitoes. And not just any mosquito. A special, genetically modified mosquito designed to protect people's health.
While the modified mosquito has yet to make the two-mile wide island its home, local mosquito control officials are busy making the case that its intentional release will help safely contain the risk of mosquito-borne dengue fever, which made a startling reappearance in Key West in 2009. The male mosquito is…
cmonforton | March 28, 2012[Update below (7/14/14)]
In 1991, Dan Quayle was US Vice President, General Norman Schwarzkopf led the 100-hour assault known as Operation Desert Storm, and Phil Collins had the record of the year. It was the last (and only) time that the US Congress amended the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) to update the monetary penalty amounts that could be assessed to employers who violate worker safety regulations. These changes were just a tiny part of the massive Omnibus Budget Reconcilation Act of 1990, but were significant in that they increased OSHA's maximum penalty amounts seven-…
lborkowski | March 27, 2012Earlier this month, the Mine Safety and Health Administration released results of an internal review into the agency's actions leading up to the April 5, 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, which killed 29 miners in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The Executive Summary reports, "While the Internal Review team did not find evidence that the actions of District 4 personnel or inadequacies in MSHA safety and health standards, policies, or procedures caused the explosion, the team found several instances where enforcement efforts at UBB were compromised because MSHA and District 4 did not follow…
cmonforton | March 26, 2012In October 2009, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) made national headlines when it proposed a record-setting $87 million penalty against BP Products North America Inc. for the company' failure to correct serious safety hazards at its Texas City, Texas refinery. Ten months later, OSHA announced that it reached a settlement with BP regarding some of those violations and penalties, with the firm agreeing to pay $50.6 million.
It's not unusual for the penalty amounts proposed by OSHA to be reduced significantly to a figure eventually paid by the…
cmonforton | March 23, 2012Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA's Hazard Communication standard which align the agency's 30 year old rule with a globally harmonized system for classifying and labeling chemical hazards. In "Moving from Right-to-Know to Right-to-Understand," we learn how the changes stem from a 2002 United Nations resolution and why they should help U.S. workers better protect themselves from chemical hazards in their workplaces.
I spent some time this week reading for myself the 858-page document, and by the time I got to page 20 it was clear that…
lborkowski | March 22, 2012Today is World Water Day, and this year's theme is "Water and Food Security." UN Water explains why we should care:
Each of us needs to drink 2 to 4 litres of water every day. But it takes 2 000 to 5 000 litres of water to produce one person's daily food.
Today, there are over 7 billion people to feed on the planet and this number is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050.
To be able to feed everybody, we first need to secure water, in sufficient quantity and adequate quality.
We will also need to produce more food using less water, reduce food wastage and losses, and move towards more…
egrossman | March 21, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
His job, the Metalworkers Alliance of the Philippines union leader told us, was assembling the electronics - the wire- or cable-harnesses - that go into cars. The work involved soldering, using flux, along with epoxies, and various degreasers or solvents. He and his co-workers didn't know the actual names of the substances they were working with or what was in those products. They also didn't know if it was a coincidence, but two co-workers had become seriously ill and the union leader and other co-workers had begun to worry that these diseases might have been caused by…
lborkowski | March 20, 2012Friday will be the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, and there's plenty of discussion about the law's impacts and the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments. While many of the law's provisions won't take effect until 2014, it's already having an impact on some aspects of health insurance. I described several of these in a post on the law's one-year anniversary, so now I want to focus on two recent stories that underscore the difficulty and importance of changing how the US handles health insurance.
First, it's important to remember that the law isn't an overhaul…
cmonforton | March 19, 2012The $109 billion transportation bill passed last week in the Senate has a title that doesn't even mention roads or highways. It's called the ''Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act'' (MAP-21) The 74 Senators who voted in favor of the bill (S. 1813), including 22 Republicans, described their support in terms of its potential to save and create nearly 3 million jobs, many in the construction industry.
One provision of the legislation fits especially well with the bill's title, with real potential to make progress on worker safety while we move ahead with transportation projects…
lborkowski | March 16, 2012by Kim Krisberg
"CQ, CQ Celebrating National Public Health Week!" "CQ, CQ Celebrating National Public Health Week!"
If you're an aficionado of amateur radio -- or ham radio as it's also known -- this is the call you might hear coming out of Oklahoma City on April 6. In layman's terms, it means "Calling all stations, calling all stations! Celebrating National Public Health Week!"
In honor of this year's National Public Health Week observance, which runs April 2-8, officials with the Oklahoma City-County Health Department will hold a special drill in which all of its amateur communications…
lborkowski | March 15, 2012Yesterday, the Senate passed a two-year transportation bill by a vote of 74 to 22, putting us close to getting a reasonably good piece of legislation signed by March 31, when the current stopgap extension will expire. Last month, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a terrible bill that would have eliminated the current dedicated funding for public transportation, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has so far not brought it to the floor for a vote. The American Public Health Association and 15 other public-health groups wrote to Representatives urging a "no" vote on the House…
cmonforton | March 14, 2012To mark Sunshine Week, the annual initiative to promote freedom of information and government openness, I'm examining OSHA's performance in disclosing information about worker fatality cases. My interest in this particular transparency issue stems back to the first year of the Obama Administration, when in October 2009, a new feature appeared front-and-center on federal OSHA's homepage. It read: "Worker Fatalities."
I gave OSHA's new leadership credit for reminding visitors to its website that workers are killed everyday on the job, many from preventable causes. The weekly postings by…
lborkowski | March 13, 2012National Sleep Awareness Week might have been last week, but many of us are feeling the importance of shuteye this week, as we struggle to drag ourselves out of bed at what feels like an inappropriate hour. While Daylight Saving Time may get the blame for sleepiness this week, though, there are important year-round factors that cause fatigue. In honor of National Sleep Awareness Week, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's NIOSH Science Blog published two posts about the impact of work demands on sleep. Claire Caruso and Roger Rosa start off by highlighting the…
cmonforton | March 12, 2012Making a $10,000 bet, insulting people for wearing plastic rain ponchos, and asserting that $374,000 is not much to earn in speaking fees are just a few examples of Mitt Romney being out of touch. The Republican Presidential hopeful doesn't seem to have a clue either about how federal agencies like EPA and OSHA conduct their work. On Romney's website, his issue brief on "Regulations" says:
"A look across the landscape shows that federal agencies today have near plenary power to issue whatever regulations they see fit. Though most are nominally controlled by the president, in actual…