kkrisberg | December 2, 2016More than 2 million U.S. adults may be living with workplace-related asthma, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Published this week in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the study is based on data from the 2013 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) industry and occupational module, which gathered information from 21 states for adults ages 18 and older who were employed or had been out of work for one year or less. Among the survey respondents, 7.7 percent had asthma, with researchers estimating that upward of 2.7 million adults…
cmonforton | November 30, 2016Good for them! They beat Congress’ deadline by 20 days.
That’s the first thing that came to mind yesterday when I read EPA’s announcement about the first 10 chemicals it's selected for risk evaluations. EPA’s announcement is the first major milestone established by Congress when it passed sweeping changes earlier this year to the Toxic Substances Control Act. One provision of the law (Section 2605(b)(2)(A)) directed EPA to select 10 chemical substances from its 2014 "TSCA Work Plan for Chemical Assessments" and begin risk evaluations on them no later than 180 days after the law was enacted (i…
kkrisberg | November 29, 2016The percentage of Americans who reported cost-related barriers to health care dropped from 37 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2016 — a change that directly corresponds to insurance expansions under the Affordable Care Act, a new study reports. On the flip side, Americans are still more likely than peers in other high-income nations to face financial obstacles to health care.
The study is based on findings from a survey of patients and providers in 11 countries and one that the Commonwealth Fund has been conducting annually since 1998. Those 11 countries are: Australia, Canada, France,…
Free on-line course on “decent work in global supply chains” offered by the Global Labour University
garrettbrown | November 29, 2016A free, two-month course on global supply chains is being offered on-line by the Global Labour University starting on January 12, 2017. The course is being taught in English by Penn State University Professor Mark Anner, one the leading labor-oriented researchers on the global economy. There's a video trailer for the course and enrollment for the course is now open.
The course brochure has the following description of the course:
“Global Supply Chains, controlled by transnational corporations, determine the ‘rules of the game’ in today’s global economy. Decent Work gaps are widespread in…
garrettbrown | November 29, 2016A new report by four leading workers’ rights group shows just how hard it is to get international clothing brands to fix problems in their global supply chains despite the fact that 1,100 workers were killed in an instant in an unsafe garment factory in Bangladesh.
Three and a half years after the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, five major clothing brands – Walmart, Gap, VF, Target and Hudson’s Bay – were found to have continuing hazards and dangerous delays in fixing them. What’s worse is that one of the three international inspection programs in Bangladesh – the…
lborkowski | November 28, 2016New data from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics show that the US teen birth rate dropped substantially between 2007 and 2015, but it has declined most slowly in rural areas. "From 2007 through 2015, teen birth rates declined 50% in large urban counties, 44% in medium and small urban counties, and 37% in rural counties," Brady E. Hamilton, Lauren M. Rossen, and Amy M. Branum report. They note that declines occurred in all states and in all major racial groups, but geographic disparities have persisted.
In a 2014 Guttmacher Policy Review article, Heather D. Boonstra investigated…
kkrisberg | November 23, 2016At In These Times, Elizabeth Grossman writes about whether workplace safety will survive a Trump presidency, noting that “Trump’s transition team has said he will introduce a moratorium on new regulations and cancel executive orders and regulations ‘that kill jobs and bloat government.’” In interviewing labor, health and safety advocates, Grossman writes that a number of federal protections could land on the chopping block, including the new overtime rule, proposed beryllium rule and fall protections. Grossman writes:
How does Trump’s promise to reduce and eliminate regulations square with…
lborkowski | November 22, 2016In the days following the 2016 election, reports of hate crimes and harassment have spiked, and experts have described it as being worse than in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks. Between Wednesday, November 9 (the day after the election) and the morning of November 14, the Southern Poverty Law Center had collected 437 of hateful intimidation and harassment – and noted that “many incidents involved direct references to the Trump campaign and its slogans.”
I spent part of the weekend reading news and opinion pieces about Donald Trump and US racism and xenophobia. The excerpts…
cmonforton | November 21, 2016The Butterball turkey plant in Huntsville, Arkansas ramps up production beginning in October to meet the demand for fresh (not frozen) Thanksgiving turkeys. The working conditions are already dismal. The bad situation is magnified during this peak season as workers on the production line try to keep up with turkey carcasses moving passed at 51 per minute.
Just in time for this week’s holiday, Gabriel Thompson reports on the experiences of Butterball workers in an article appearing today in Slate. One worker, a former prison guard from Puerto Rico named Lisandro Vega spoke to Thompson. Vega…
kkrisberg | November 18, 2016In 2005, Florida legislators passed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” law, expanding legal immunity for residents to use lethal force when they believe they’re being threatened. A decade later, a new study finds that Florida has experienced a significant increase in homicides, while states without such laws have not.
“From a public health perspective, we were shocked that in a given area, rates of people dying changed so abruptly and in such a sustained way,” study co-author Douglas Wiebe, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of…
cmonforton | November 17, 2016Two new reports describe the working conditions for some of the 21 million workers in the U.S. food industry. Food workers constitute 14 percent of the U.S. workforce. They are employed across the system from those who work on farms and in canning plants, to meat packers, grocery store clerks and restaurant dishwashers.
No Piece of the Pie: U.S. Food Workers in 2016 was released this week by the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The report examines employment trends, wages, advancement opportunities, discrimination, and work-related injuries. The authors use government and industry data, but…
kkrisberg | November 16, 2016More and more of America’s adolescents and young adults are struggling with depression, especially young women, according to a study released earlier this week.
Published in the journal Pediatrics, the study found that the rate of adolescents who reported a recent episode of clinical depression increased by 37 percent between 2005 and 2014. Among girls, one in six reported a bout of clinical depression in the last year. In particular, the 12-month prevalence of a major depressive episode increased from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014 among adolescents, and from 8.8 percent to 9.6…
cmonforton | November 14, 2016The environmental justice, public health, and other communities are mourning the death of Steve Wing. Dr. Wing was an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. I did not have the privilege of personally knowing Dr. Wing, but I often used his papers in the classroom. His articles on collaborative research projects with communities which were adversely affected by industrial swine operations were exceptional for their intersection of science and social justice (e.g., here, here, here.)
Among those remembering Steve Wing is…
lborkowski | November 14, 2016by Jill Johnston, PhD
Steve and I were driving down a long stretch of two lane highway in eastern North Carolina. The six-hour round-trip journey happened frequently so Steve could visit residents most impacted by the industrial hog industry. Today, we were visiting a family concerned about their water quality and recent results they received from water testing – they had called Steve for interpretation. Then to a local church to hear from community leaders about the preparation of a Civil Rights lawsuit. Looking back, these thousands of miles I had the good fortune to spend on the road with…
kkrisberg | November 11, 2016Three days out from the election and many of us are still trying to adjust to this new reality. It’s been a very rough week.
And assuming that we take the new president-elect at his word — that we believe the promises he made on the campaign trail — public health workers and advocates, as well as the often-vulnerable people and communities they serve, now face a very difficult four years. Fortunately, public health has plenty of practice confronting and overcoming powerfully entrenched interests for the greater good. Just ask Big Tobacco.
In that vein, below are excerpts from post-election…
lborkowski | November 11, 2016Months after a severe earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, UN peacekeeping troops exacerbated Haitians’ suffering by introducing cholera to the country, via waste that leaked from a UN housing base into the Artibonite river. The disease sickened 800,000 people and killed more than 9,000 – although a study at four sites in northern Haiti found the actual death toll could be substantially higher than the official count. In August 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon acknowledged the UN’s role in Haiti’s cholera epidemic, accepting moral but not legal responsibility.
The UN was working to…
cmonforton | November 11, 2016I’m not easily shocked to learn about injustice against workers. But my jaw hit the floor in fall 2013 when I read Chris Hamby’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning series on the lengths to which coal companies go to dispute that miners have coal-dust related lung disease (a.k.a. black lung.) My jaw hit the floor a second time when Hamby (then with the Center for Public Integrity) exposed that Johns Hopkins University and its employee Dr. Paul Wheeler where star players on the coal operators’ teams.
The families of Steve Day, 67, and Junior McCoy Barr, 79, have now filed a lawsuit against the…
garrettbrown | November 9, 2016By Garrett Brown and Bob Jeffcott
A group of brave women’s rights and labor activists in San Pedro Sula, Honduras were the recipients of the 2016 International Award of the Occupational Health and Safety Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). The distinction was formally announced at the association's annual meeting. Lynda Yanz, Executive Director of the Maquila Solidarity Network, based in Toronto, Canada, traveled to Denver, Colorado to accept the award on behalf of the Honduras Independent Monitoring Team (EMIH) at the November 1st awards luncheon.
EMIH team (L to R):…
kkrisberg | November 8, 2016At The New York Times, Dan Barry reports on the Hispanic hotel workers who are becoming a powerful political force in Las Vegas. In particular, the story focuses on the 56,000-member Culinary Union, whose membership is more than half Hispanic. The story is told through the eyes of Celia Vargas, 57, a guest room attendant at a hotel along the famous Vegas Strip — Barry writes:
Despite their name tags, guest room attendants are anonymous. They go unnoticed by many as they push their 300-pound carts to the next room, and the next.
A glimpse of what is expected of these attendants can be found at…
egrossman | November 4, 2016On a typical week, about 3 million people are on the job in the United States as temp workers, this according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In September 2016, just shy of 3 million people were working as temps – an all-time high. Numbers can vary depending on how temp work is defined, but according to the BLS, temp jobs now account for about 2.4 percent of all U.S. private sector jobs. Yet, said National Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) co-executive director Jessica Martinez on a call with reporters, “Temp workers represent almost 17 percent – or one out of…