cmonforton | December 1, 2011The US Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is preparing to issue next week its investigation report on the April 5, 2010 coal mine disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 workers. Ken Ward, Jr. at Coal Tattoo reports that MSHA will hold a media briefing at 3:00 pm (EST) on December 6 at its training academy near Beckley WV. The Charleston (WV) Gazette reporter reminds us that December 6 is an ominous date. It marks the 104th anniversary of the Monongah disaster, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history.
MSHA's investigation report will be the…
lborkowski | November 30, 2011by Mark Pendergrast
This is my second post in a series of three about the state of Japan's renewable energy efforts, which are vital to prevent further climate change and to wean the country from fossil fuel and nuclear power. In the previous post, I covered the public-health impacts of climate change and explained why Japan is a good indicator of whether countries will be able to act quickly enough in the face of these threats. Japan's reliance on imported fossil fuels gives it a good reason to invest in alternatives, and its technological sophistication should help it develop renewable-…
lborkowski | November 29, 2011Although the news of a shopper using pepper spray was disturbing, I was glad that Black Friday 2011 passed without the kind of tragedy that happened in 2008, when 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was killed by a stampede of shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, Long Island. OSHA cited Wal-Mart for a serious violation of the General Duty clause, and Chief Administrative Law Judge Covette Rooney upheld the citation and $7,000 penalty (which Wal-Mart challenged at an estimated cost of $2 million), issuing her decision on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
Since Damour's…
cmonforton | November 28, 2011A new report by the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) confirms what some of us have suspected: there's not much difference between the Obama Admininstration's and GW Bush Administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) when it comes to meetings with industry lobbyists and giving lip-service to transparency.
In "Behind Closed Doors at the White House," CPR offers a 10-year analysis of the 6,194 draft regulatory actions reviewed by OIRA, a step in the rulemaking process dictated by Executive Order (EO) 12866 for rules of particular significance. Their assessment examined…
lborkowski | November 28, 2011The UN climate talks going on in Durban aren't likely to lead to any major breakthroughs, but it would be nice if the US could at least avoid backsliding on the better-than-nothing steps it's taken on emissions. One important step for controlling emissions is ensuring the availability of affordable public transportation. Congress has helped make public transit more affordable for workers for the past three years by temporarily raising the limit on the monthly amount of pretax salary that can be set aside for transit. The problem is that limit, currently set at $230 per month, is set to drop…
cmonforton | November 25, 2011Before too long the US Department of Labor (DOL) and other federal agencies should be issuing their annual regulatory plans and semi-annual agendas. These documents serve as official public notice of agencies' regulatory (and deregulatory) priorities. The Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order (EO) 12866 direct agency heads to release these documents in April (agenda) and October (plan and agenda), but the Obama Administration doesn't have a good track record meeting those deadlines.
I'm not going to predict when the next agenda and plan will be issued or, as I did in the Spring, on…
lborkowski | November 23, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
A special investigative series by several reporters at Center for Public Integiryt/iWatch News and NPR: Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities
Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science: About Pepper Spray (also see her followup, Fox News Food Products)
and, relatedly:
Judy Stone at the Scientific American Guest Blog: Should pepper spray be put on (clinical) trial?
Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein at Pro Publica: Florida Sanctions Top Medicaid Prescribers -- But Only After a Shove
And just in time for Thanksgiving travel and turkey consumption:
Simon…
lborkowski | November 22, 2011by Kim Krisberg
It's too early to tell just how many families Elizabeth Frerking and her colleagues at the Saline County Health Department in Marshall, Mo., will have to turn away, but it's likely to be too many. As of Oct. 1 and due to cuts in federal immunization funding, Frerking can only administer vaccines to children with no insurance at all or those with Medicaid coverage. However, it wasn't always like that.
"Previously, any family could come here and get immunizations -- we didn't turn anybody away," Frerking, the department's vaccine coordinator, told me. "Now, we get to be the ones…
lborkowski | November 21, 2011by Mark Pendergrast
I'm going to talk about Japanese renewable energy in a minute, but first let me explain why.
In 2010, I published a book on public health (Inside the Outbreaks), and as a follow-up, I concluded that the overarching threat to the world's public health that we face in the coming decades is climate change, for a number of reasons. According to most scientists, three trends will conflate to create substantial problems. 1) We will run out of oil. 2) Climate change will have a profound impact on the environment and our lives. 3) The world's population will grow from 7…
cmonforton | November 18, 2011For U.S. workers, the risk of dying on the job is highest if you are employed in agricultural, fishing or hunting. These jobs are not just a little riskier than the average job, they are nearly 8 times more life-threatening. The fatality rate for all private sector workers is 3.5 per 100,000 workers; in agriculture, fishing and hunting, the rate is 26.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. Combine these statistics with age-specific fatality rates and it was time for the US Department of Labor (DOL) to review the adequacy of its safety regulations for children working in farming jobs. The rules…
lborkowski | November 17, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its "watch list." The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act - but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies' occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators…
lborkowski | November 16, 2011by Dick Clapp, DSc, MPH
My friend Dr. Paul Epstein succumbed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on Sunday, Nov. 13, three days short of his 68th birthday. Here are some thoughts about him that I wanted to share with TPH readers. First, he was a compassionate physician who worked in low income communities early in his career. He went overseas with his wife Andy, a nurse, in 1978-80 as a "cooperante" in newly independent Mozambique. When he came back to Boston, he continued to practice family medicine while he enrolled in a master's program in tropical public health at Harvard. During this phase, he…
lborkowski | November 15, 2011A few thought-provoking pieces I've read this week demonstrate the extent to which the US is failing to invest in our next generation. John Schmid of the Journal Sentinel points out that 44 other countries have lower infant mortality rates than the US (by UNICEF ranking), and we're tied for 45th place with Montenegro and Slovakia. Our overall national rate - 6.06 per 1,000 live births, according to the CIA World Factbook - conceals a great deal of variability by state and city, though. (See the Annie E. Casey Foundation's map for details on state-to-state differences.) Schmid zooms in on…
cmonforton | November 14, 2011She's a hospice nurse. When I tell people her occupation, I typically receive a response like this: "She must be a very special person. I could never work in a place where people go to die." Hospice is a "place," and equating hospice to death, are just two of the misperceptions that hospice care providers and proponents are constantly working to dispel. Providing correct information that hospice is a philosophy of care (not a place) takes on special importance in November because it is National Hospice and Palliative Care month.
Data from 2010 indicates that more than 68% of hospice…
cmonforton | November 11, 2011[Updated 11/14/11 below]
Barrick Goldstrike is the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of $51.0 Billion. With that kind of wealth, one has to ask why workers at the company's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada were compelled to use a broom handle to keep a reset button depressed, so tons of aggregate rock would continue to flow down a shaft. That jerry-rigging along with the mine management's failure to correct other defects, such as missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate carrying pipe system, led to the death of Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr,…
lborkowski | November 10, 2011Thailand is experiencing its worst flooding since 1942, and millions of people are affected. The death toll has reached 533, due mostly to drowning but also to electrocutions. CNN reports that more than 113,000 people have arrived at 1,700 government shelters set up across the country, and Bangkok officials have warned residents of interruptions to electricity and tap water.
In addition to immediate dangers like drowning, the potential for widespread disease outbreaks is worrisome.
Citing concerns about water-borne diseases spreading through contaminated floodwater, UNICEF announced that it…
lborkowski | November 9, 2011A rock burst at a coal mine in China's Henan province has killed a total of 10 miners. The explosion happened just after a minor 2.9-magnitude earthquake occurred nearby, and 45 workers were rescued after 36 hours underground - although two of those workers later died of their injuries.
Last month, a gas explosion at a coal mine in Hunan provice killed 29 miners, while six survived. (29 was also the death toll from the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster in West Virginia.) CCTV reported that the mine had lost its operating license earlier this year after failing to ventilate sufficiently, but…
cmonforton | November 8, 2011An overwhelming majority of seniors want to remain in their own homes as long as possible. Residing with a family member or friends may not be an option, and assisted living facilities may take too big a chunk out of a senior's fixed income. Older Americans, and I'd argue most of us, feel more independent when surrounded by their own belongings and in their own community. But, living alone or with another frail senior, like a spouse, can create its own problems. Millions of U.S. seniors suffer from hunger and food insecurity, some because of resource constraints, but others because of…
lborkowski | November 7, 2011By Mark Pendergrast
As I watched the blockbuster bio-thriller Contagion, I was struck by how realistic it was in many ways. That isn't surprising, since many epidemiologists, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, served as advisors. The film was based on a simple premise. What if a new, deadly virus that kills one out of four people it infects were also easily transmissible from human to human?
I knew more about the subject than most people in the audience, because I spent five years researching and writing Inside the Outbreaks, a history…
lborkowski | November 4, 2011SciDev.Net's TV Padma reports that tuberculosis experts are looking to India to develop affordable TB-testing kits. An estimated four million cases of the disease go undetected, and two million TB patients die every year. India has increased its efforts at finding and treating cases of the disease, but diagnostics still present a challenge, Padma explains:
TB tests come in a range. Latent infections can show up as a reaction when the protein, tuberculin, is injected under the skin. Blood tests may reveal immune molecules (gamma interferon) produced by the body to protect against the bacterium…