lborkowski | August 16, 2011I somehow missed this when it first happened, but the state of Connecticut made history last month when Governor Dan Malloy signed legislation requiring up to five paid sick days per year for service workers at businesses with 50 or more employees. Christopher Keating gave these details in the Hartford Courant after the state's House of Representative passed the measure:
Manufacturing firms and nationally chartered nonprofit organizations like the YMCA would be exempt, and the bill also would not cover day laborers, independent contractors, salaried workers, and temporary workers.
Unlike in…
cmonforton | August 15, 2011The Republican chairmen of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and its Subcommittee on Workforce Protections are invoking "sound science" and "transparency" in a request to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for data and draft publications of a cancer mortality study of underground miners exposed to diesel exhaust. Congressman John Kline (R-MN) and Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote to NIOSH director John Howard onJuly 8, suggesting that the agency is violating a 2001 federal court order. That order stemmed from a lawsuit filed more than 15 years ago by the…
lborkowski | August 12, 2011The US spends far more per capita on healthcare than any other developed country -- $7,538 per person, compared to $3,129 in the UK, $4,079 in Canada, and $5,003 in Norway (the second-biggest spender), according to 2008 totals compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. One contributor to our high healthcare costs is high administrative costs, which is the natural consequence of having hundreds of different insurance plans with different policies, networks, and rates. A new study in the journal Health Affairs focuses on one aspect of administrative costs: the time physician practices spend…
cmonforton | August 11, 2011[Update 8/15/2011 below]
Tyler Zander, 17 and Bryce Gannon, 17 were working together on Thursday, August 4 at the Zaloudek Grain Co. in Kremlin, Oklahoma. They were operating a large floor grain aguer when something went terribly wrong. Oklahoma's News9.com reports that Bryce Gannon's legs became trapped in the auger, Tyler Zander went to his friend's aid and his legs also were pulled into the heavy machinery. Emergency rescue personnel had to cut apart the 12-inch metal auger in order to free the young men. They were flown 100 miles to Oklahoma City for surgery and they remain…
lborkowski | August 10, 2011Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that many law enforcement agencies are reducing their attempts to shut down methamphetamine manufacturing because they can no longer afford to clean up the labs.
Brian Freskos of North Carolina's Star News reported back in May that Congress has generally appropriated $10 million for meth lab cleanup annually, and the Druge Enforcement Agency has administered the funds - but this year, the money ran out in February. Freskos writes:
For decades, when police found a meth lab, the federal government funded what was essentially hazardous waste removal.…
cmonforton | August 9, 2011Individuals who "blow the whistle" have the courage to tell authorities about corruption, fraud or safety hazards in their organization, even when doing so may result in being demoted or reassigned, fired or passed over for promotion, or discriminated against in another way. Whistleblowers are truck drivers who refuse to drive unsafe vehicles, railroad workers who report work-related injuries, or a bank manager who alleged financial securities fraud. There are dozens of federal laws designed to protect whistleblowers from adverse action by their employers, including provisions in the Clean…
lborkowski | August 9, 2011Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend the opening of a Smithsonian Museum of Natural History exhibit dedicated to the rescue of 33 miners from the San José mine in Chile, and meet two of miners whose story captivated the world as they endured 69 days underground following a mine explosion. Carlos Barrios, Jorge Galleguillos, José HenrÃquez, and Mario Sepúlveda traveled to DC for the opening of "Against All Odds: Rescue at the Chilean Mine," a small but powerful exhibit whose centerpiece is one of the capsules built to haul the miners up 2,000 feet through the narrow shaft drilled…
egrossman | August 8, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
While the rest of the country has been experiencing an epic heat wave, in the Pacific Northwest where I live, thus far the summer has been unusually cool. One consequence of the cool weather is a slow-to-appear local tomato crop, made evident to consumers by some remarkably high prices. A pint of organic cherry tomatoes at my neighborhood market recently jumped more than a dollar within a week to $4.99, prompting me to wonder precisely what goes into the price of tomatoes.
Regional growers, distributors, and retailers all told me that prices are typically determined by…
cmonforton | August 5, 2011Earlier this week, I reported on the death of Margarito Guardado Resinos, 34, at a construction project in my hometown of San Marcos, TX. Mr. Resinos employer, Jetka Steel Erectors, had been inspected by OSHA in December 2010, at a different construction site, and received citations in May 2011 for four serious violations of safety standards. I noticed however that the $12,000 penalty proposed by OSHA for the violations had been reduced to $6,100 through a settlement agreement with the company. Moreover, two of the four serious violations were reclassified with the label "other-than-…
lborkowski | August 5, 2011By Anthony Robbins
According to the New York Times, President Obama will create an Atrocities Prevention Board. You might well ask, what has this to do with public health? I might have had the same thought except for a Commentary that my co-editor and I published in the Journal of Public Health Policy. Elihu Richter, an old friend and colleague in environmental health - a mentee of the late Irving Selikoff, in fact - first explained why genocide prevention is public health. It was a struggle to get him to write on the topic, so we designed a harmless ruse. How about a book review of Paul…
lborkowski | August 4, 2011By Anthony Robbins
Natural gas producers are battling public concerns over the public-health effects of their extraction techniques. Does injection of water and toxic chemicals deep into the ground to release natural gas contaminate ground water, potentially drinking water? Now it appears that a strategy we have discussed before, settled lawsuits and confidentiality agreements, has prevented almost everyone from learning about the instances where serious contamination has been caused by fracking.
Today's New York Times reports that an EPA report by Carla Greathouse that described…
lborkowski | August 4, 2011A strain of salmonella, Salmonella Heidelberg, has sickened at least 77 people in 26 states and killed one in California. The outbreak has been linked to ground turkey produced at an Arkansas plant, and Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation has announced a recall of about 36 million pounds of the meat. The meat is sold under the Honeysuckle brand and bear the establishment number P-963 inside the USDA inspection mark. USDA has a list of affected products on its website.
This strain of salmonella is resistant to several commonly prescribed antibiotics. As William Neuman notes in the New York…
cmonforton | August 3, 2011Margarito Guardado Resinos, 34, and Nelson Pineda were working together to erect a pre-engineered steel building frame at a construction site in San Marcos, TX. The two were employed by Jetka Steel Erectors of Katy, TX, a firm hired by Bailey Elliot Construction of Austin to erect a new building for Thermon Manufacturing at the central Texas location. (I moved to San Marcos, TX last fall and the Thermon facility is on the service road for I-35, only a few miles from my home.) Just before noon on July 27, 2011 the metal structure collapsed, killing Mr. Resinos and injurying Mr. Pineda.…
lborkowski | August 2, 2011I wrote last month about the Institute of Medicine recommendations regarding preventive health services for women that should be covered by all new health plans without requiring co-payments or other cost sharing. Like many other supporters of women's health, I was especially interested in the proposal that contraceptives be covered at no charge to women. So, I was happy to hear that the Department of Health and Human Services has released a rule that accepts all of the IOM's recommendations.
Here's the list of preventive services that private health plans will have to start covering without…
lborkowski | August 1, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein's blog: Will the new fuel economy rules actually work?
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Is Polio Eradication Slipping Out of Reach?
David Bornstein at the New York Times' Opinionator: Treating the Cause, Not the Illness
John Culhane at Slate: Concussions and Cigarettes ("A new lawsuit claims the NFL is like Big Tobacco. Does the case have merit?")
Zuska at Thus Spake Zuska: Hunger Relief vs. Poverty Relief: I Vote for More of Both
lborkowski | July 29, 2011by Rebecca Reindel
Holidays are interesting times of the year. Many of us fill our schedule with time to visit friends and family across the nation, and even across the globe. When our plans involve air travel, many of us line-up alongside the baggage carousel station while we wait for our prized possessions to roll out onto the conveyor belt. We are eager to see if our luggage made the trip in the same condition as we checked it.
On a recent trip from Denver to Washington DC, I deplaned and headed to retrieve my belongings from baggage claim. I patiently waited for the blinking light…
lborkowski | July 28, 2011Months of a severe drought in East Africa have led to famine in two regions in Southern Somalia. According to the UN's definition, famines can only be declared under the following conditions:
At least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons per day per 10,000 persons.
These horrific conditions exist in Somalia's Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions. Much of the rest of the country, as well as neighboring parts of Ethiopia and Kenya, are experiencing food…
lborkowski | July 27, 2011Though the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant has faded from the headlines, cleanup work continues amid high radiation levels. TIME's Krista Mahr reports that Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has just released a document that includes an April estimate that 1600 workers will be exposed to high levels of radiation while working to stabilize the plant. Japan's government raised the exposure limit from 100 millisieverts per year to 250 after this disaster occurred; the just-released document expresses concern that if too many workers reach this limit working at…
cmonforton | July 26, 2011[Updated 9/21/11: see below]
Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk......is the familar sound around house framing and roofing jobs of the pnuematic nail gun. !Expletive! Expletive! Argh....Expletive!....is the cursing yelps from guys whose fingers, hands, and other body parts are punctured by nails inadvertently shot from these construction tools. An estimated 37,000 individuals in the US are treated annually in hospital emergency rooms for nail gun injuries. Moreover, nail guns are responsible for the most tool-related hospital admissions for workers in the construction trades…
lborkowski | July 25, 2011By Kim Krisberg
We're talking about it all wrong. Health reform, that is. We (reformers) think we're answering the questions that will change opponents' minds, when there's no answer that will ever satisfy. My head hurts just thinking about it (though a giant, energy-efficient light bulb flickered on over my head after I thought about it a bit.)
In essence, how do we talk about public health values? That was one of the main -- and I think most interesting -- topics at the American Public Health Association's Midyear Meeting in Chicago in late June, which focused exclusively on "Implementing…