lborkowski | September 9, 2011Deriding government bureaucrats seems to be a popular pasttime among certain politicians and talk-radio hosts, so it's nice every so often to remind ourselves about the important and valuable work our civil servants do. An article by Patricia Sullivan in the Washington Post provides a glimpse into the world of one longtime federal-government employee who's made a difference for public health. Lawrence Deyton is currently director of the Food and Drug Aministration's Center for Tobacco Products, and he also spent many years working on clinical trials of HIV drugs and a range of veterans health…
cmonforton | September 8, 2011After two teenagers' legs were severed while they were working near a grain auger, I wrote last month about the White House's role in holding up a proposed Labor Department rule to address hazards for young workers. After a 9-month delay by the White House, the Labor Department released the proposed rule last week and is asking the public to submit comments on it by November 1. After reviewing the proposal, it's hard to imagine why such common sense improvements to protect young workers drew such time-consuming scrutiny from the President's regulatory czar.
The proposed rules will amend the…
lborkowski | September 7, 2011American Public Media's Marketplace program is taking a look at "the economic legacy of 9/11" this week, and this morning's story focused on security spending in the private sector. Marketplace's Jeff Horwich highlighted an unexpected example: security for grain elevators.
For you city-folk, grain elevators are America's rural skyscrapers. Farmers dump their corn, wheat, soybeans. Trucks haul it out to feed the country. Even though elevators are mostly in the middle of nowhere, Bob Zelenka of the Minnesota Grain and Feed Association says you never know.
Bob Zelenka: It's on the edge of town…
cmonforton | September 6, 2011Last Friday when the White House told Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson to drop her plans to revise the national ambient standard for ozone, it seemed like just another example of President Obama caving to business interests. Others were quick to remind me though that bowing to business is not the half of it: the White House order is illegal. As University of Texas law professor Tom McGarity explains,
"Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is required to establish ambient air quality standards at a level that protects human health with an adequate margin of safety. It's…
lborkowski | September 5, 2011The Department of Labor's Labor Day 2011 website features some interesting historical info on this holiday, and an address from Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis that focuses on job creation. What I found particularly interesting was an op-ed by Secretary Solis - one of many linked from the site's News page - published Friday in The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. It begins:
On Labor Day, we honor the contributions working men and women have made throughout history to the strength and prosperity of our nation. There are many, and they deserve the tribute.
But throughout our nation's history, there…
lborkowski | September 2, 2011A study just published in The Lancet compares the incidence rates of cancers in firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center site during and after the 9/11 attacks to the rates in firefighters not exposed to the disaster or its aftermath. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center and the New York Fire Department's Bureau of Health Services found that WTC firefighters had an overall cancer incidence ratio about 10% higher than that of a general population with similar demographics and 32% higher than that of non-WTC firefighters.
Firefighters who…
lborkowski | September 1, 2011Pictures of Hurricane Irene's destruction are circulating and making many of us realize we're lucky to still have our homes and power lines intact. There's also one Irene-related problem that's invisible to the naked eye: raw sewage in waterways. Here's the Washington Post's Darryl Fears on local contamination:
DC Water officials estimate that 200 million gallons of rain mixed with raw sewage overwhelmed pumping stations and poured into waterways around the city during the downpour from Hurricane Irene.
The sewer overflow contributed to a flood of wastewater into rivers and streams over the…
cmonforton | August 31, 2011In a week that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) rallied his Members with a plan to repeal "job-destroying regulations," the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) provides strong evidence to debunk the House Republican's rhetoric. In "Saving Lives, Preserving the Environment, Growing the Economy: The Truth about Regulation," CPR scholars provide concrete examples of profound benefits to society of safety and environmental regulations. It's a stark contrast to Mr. Cantor's one-sided view of regulations: they cost money, while completely ignoring their value to the health, safety and…
egrossman | August 30, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
On Sunday August 21, a cleaning process designed to make tomatoes safe for customers eating marinara sauce, pizza topping, and canned tomatoes resulted in a release of chlorine dioxide gas that sent 43 workers at the Pacific Coast Producers plant in Woodland, California to area hospitals. According to Pacific Coast Producers vice president Mona Shulman, a malfunction of sanitizing equipment caused an "overdosing" of chlorine dioxide, causing the chemical to off-gas to the atmosphere. Chlorine dioxide gas was also drawn into a building through the ventilation system. "The…
lborkowski | August 29, 2011Hurricane Irene wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been. The consensus here in DC seems to be "nowhere near as bad as Isabel" (which hit the Mid-Atlantic in 2003), and many of the New Yorkers who ignored Mayor Bloomberg's orders to evacuate are probably feeling smug. Nonetheless, millions of people have lost power, and damage from flooding is widespread. And, according to the Associate Press, Irene's death toll has risen to 37. (Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has compiled US death tolls of past hurricanes, and Irene is steadily becoming one of the more deadly ones.)
Although Irene had been…
cmonforton | August 29, 2011When OSHA proposed penalties in January 2011 totaling nearly $1.4 million against two Illinois grain handling companies, I noticed the agency's news release mentioned the employers' workers compensation insurance carrier. It was the first time that I'd see this in an OSHA news release, and I wondered if it was the start of something new. Apparently, not.
I reviewed the 280+ news releases on enforcement cases issued by OSHA between February 2011 and August 24, and only identified two in which the agency mentioned the employers' work comp insurance carrier.
One appeared in an April 2011…
lborkowski | August 26, 2011Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science has put up a terrific two-part post about the early history of leaded gasoline, which bears much of the blame for lead poisoning in workers and the general population. (Paint containing lead is the other main culprit.) Blum's "At the Door of the Loony Gas Building" and "Of Dead Bodies and Dirty Streets" involve plot developments that might sound familiar: product kills people, industry insists product is safe, and back-and-forth about product's safety continues for decades before the product is finally altered, eliminated, or restricted to reduce harm to…
lborkowski | August 25, 2011I felt a sense of déjà vu Tuesday morning when I heard NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on Senator Tom Coburn's attacks on National Science Foundation-funded research. I realized that the same thing happened last August, and I wrote about it in a post called "Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science." Last year, the report mocked research into addiction and older adults' cognition (among many other projects) because the projects involved administering cocaine to monkeys and introducing senior citizens to Wii games. This year, the projects up for ridicule include research…
cmonforton | August 24, 2011The process of putting a new federal regulation in place to protect individuals from serious hazards at work often takes five or more years. Part 1 of "Worker safety rulemaking" described the steps leading up to OSHA proposing a new rule, to the point where the agency's chief decides whether to send the draft proposed rule to the White House for approval.
Submitting draft proposed rule to White House for review. Under a 1993 Presidential Executive Order (EO 12866), all significant regulatory actions planned by a federal agency must be submitted to the White House's Office of Information…
lborkowski | August 23, 2011As those of you who read other ScienceBlogs are probably already aware, the ScienceBlogs overlords have decided that all bloggers on this network must blog under their own names -- no more pseudonyms. I don't understand or agree with this policy. Some of my favorite ScienceBlogs are written by authors using pseudonyms, and the quality of their content is consistently high. Readers may not be able to check these authors' credentials, so the amount of trust they place in the authors' blogs is based on the content of posts. (I don't know that quality and credibility are the rationale for the no-…
lborkowski | August 22, 2011By Kim Krisberg
Public health director Kerran Vigroux sounds almost matter-of-fact when she talks about having to shut down her department's screening services for sexually transmitted diseases. As she talks about the prevention and education opportunities that packed up and left along with the testing services, there's that familiar, barely audible public health tone to her voice -- the one that says "this makes no sense at all."
Vigroux directs public health services in the New Hampshire city of Nashua, and she isn't alone in having to shutter her department's STD services. New Hampshire…
cmonforton | August 22, 2011I recently heard an individual who works on Capitol Hill describe the kinds of questions he receives from congressional offices. One that made me laugh out loud was:
"What new regulations did OSHA issue this month?"
This month? Entire years go by without a single new worker safety regulation, and those that are issued typically address hazards in just a handful of industries. In the last 10 years, OSHA has issued six major rules. The most recent, published in May 2011, was a safety standard that will affect less than 3,000 worksites, mostly commercial fishing vessels, shipyards and…
lborkowski | August 19, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked (or, in the case of the first item, found horribly disturbing but important):
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Ringing the Warning Bell: Colistin-Resistant Klebsiella
J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica: Smoke Screen ("In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage--computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces--in open burn pits. Are toxic clouds from these sites making everyone sick?" Bonus: Celeste is quoted in the article.)
The New York Times' Room for Debate: Could Farms Survive Without Illegal Labor?
Helen Branswell at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis…
cmonforton | August 18, 2011The two 17 year old workers who were entangled two weeks ago in a grain auger remain hospitalized in the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Family and friends of Bryce Gannon, 17 and Tyler Zander, 17 created a Facebook page, "Prayers for Bryce and Tyler," that provides a glimpse of the long road of recovery ahead for them. Both suffered amputation injuries to their legs. The Facebook posts suggest that the two young men have undergone multiple surgeries to treat their wounds and identify potential sources of infections. A post on Monday, Aug 15 reported:
"Tyler's surgery to clean his…
lborkowski | August 17, 2011In a new New York Times Magazine piece, John Tierney pulls together the results of several studies that suggest willpower is finite and decisionmaking exhausting. While these findings are important in many ways (Tierney leads off with an example from the criminal justice system), I was especially interested in the implications for dieting.
The whole article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell, researchers have found that subjects' willpower can be depleted by resisting temptation and be restored by glucose -- but not by artificial sweetners that provide less energy. When subjects'…