cmonforton | May 4, 2017Cell tower worker Kris Runyon, 39, fell to his death on Tuesday, May 2 in Meridian, MS. Local news station WAPT reports the incident occurred at about 7 pm when Runyon was 228 feet off the ground on a cell tower. A co-worker witnessed the incident and the county coroner reported that Runyon was wearing safety equipment designed to prevent a fatal fall.
The industry news source WirelessEstimator.com reports that Mr. Runyon was employed by D&K Nationwide Communications. D&K is a subcontractor to MasTec, a business that provides engineering, construction, and maintenance services to…
kkrisberg | May 2, 2017At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who often end up working in the kind of dangerous and abusive conditions that few Americans would put up with.
Grabell chronicles the history of Case Farms and how it first began recruiting refugees from Guatemala who were fleeing a brutal civil war in…
kkrisberg | May 1, 2017Protecting babies and children against dangerous — sometimes fatal — diseases is a core mission of public health. Everyday, in health departments across the nation, someone is working on maintaining and improving childhood vaccination rates and keeping diseases like measles and mumps from regaining a foothold in the U.S.
Fortunately for us, public health has been so successful that it’s easy to forget what it was like just a few decades ago when measles was a common childhood illness. (Though here’s a reminder.) But sustaining vaccination rates that provide population-wide protection against…
lborkowski | May 1, 2017Back in March, House Republicans pulled the unpopular and highly problematic American Health Care Act from consideration, and House Minority Leader Paul Ryan declared “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Now, however House Republicans are trying again to undo the Affordable Care Act. Last week, Representative Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) introduced an amendment designed to win over the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, who opposed the original AHCA because it didn’t do enough to roll back existing law.
As the New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz summarizes, the amendment would allow states to receive…
cmonforton | April 28, 2017Ignoring workers’ safety concerns.
Failing to fix hazards.
Directing employees to do unsafe tasks.
Repeatedly violating safety laws.
Falsifying training records and safety audits.
Lying to safety inspectors.
Who would do such things?
Regrettably, far too many employers and 12 of them are profiled in the report “The Dirty Dozen 2017: Employers who put workers & communities at risk.” It was released this week by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) as part of global commemorations of Worker Memorial Day.
National COSH asked its expansive network of health…
cmonforton | April 27, 2017Yesterday was a notable one in the efforts to improve working conditions for U.S. poultry processing workers. At a Perdue chicken processing plant in Salisbury, Maryland, faith leaders and worker advocates delivered some special packages to company officials. Thirteen hundred miles way in Springdale, Arkansas, the U.S. largest poultry company announced new initiatives to improve conditions for its poultry processing workforce. I tip my hat to the diverse coalition of worker advocates who set the stage for these event. More on their contribution below, but first the story from Salisbury,…
kkrisberg | April 25, 2017More than 8 million U.S. children depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program for access to timely medical care. The program is authorized through 2019, but its federal funding expires in September and it’s unclear what Congress will do.
That uncertainty stresses all the systems and families that depend on CHIP, but it may be especially risky for the 2 million chronically ill children who get care through the program, which was originally designed for families falling in the gap between market affordability and Medicaid eligibility. In a study published this month in Health Affairs,…
lborkowski | April 24, 2017In September 2016, Alex Campbell and Katie J.M. Baker reported on an in-depth BuzzFeed News investigation that found Baltimore County detectives often failed to investigate rape reports. They wrote:
The Baltimore County Police Department is one of a number of law enforcement agencies nationwide with an alarming record of dismissing rape cases, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of FBI statistics. These departments routinely mark an extraordinary percentage of rape allegations as false or baseless — "unfounded.”
Baltimore County Police Department spokesperson Elise Armacost explained to…
kkrisberg | April 21, 2017There was always an assumption that the Affordable Care Act would need time to find its sea legs. That’s why it included measures to shield insurers from the potential profit losses that inherently come with offering millions more people better health coverage at more reasonable prices. Insurers operate on profit margins and the ACA took that into account, for better or for worse.
But it’s still been a rocky road for insurers. (Insert argument here for single-payer health care, but that’s a different story.) On the patient side, with 20 million more Americans insured and growing accounts of…
cmonforton | April 20, 2017The Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) Richard Denison, PhD tipped me onto news that the chemical industry’s chief trade association now has one of its own in a key EPA office.
Nancy Beck, PhD began work on Monday as second in command of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Immediately prior to her appointment, Dr. Beck was with the American Chemistry Council (ACC) in the position of Senior Director of Regulatory Science Policy. Prior to that she worked in the White House's regulatory czar's office during parts of the G.W. Bush's and Obama's administrations.
President…
lborkowski | April 20, 2017A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Michael Westerhaus, Amy Finnegan, Jennifer Goldsmith, Evan Lyon, Casey Fox, and Michelle Morse at STAT: Social justice should be a key part of educating health professionals
Scott Tong for Marketplace: Critics say HONEST Act undercuts EPA’s use of science
Caitlin Cruz in Rolling Stone: Dr. Willie Parker Wants to Take Back the Moral High Ground on Abortion
Alana Semeuels in The Atlantic: Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South
Maryn McKenna in the New York Times Magazine: Why the Menace of Mosquitoes Will Only Get Worse
George W. Bush in the…
cmonforton | April 19, 2017A new commentary by CUNY School of Public Health professor Franklin Mirer is timed perfectly for this weekend's Marches for Science.
Mirer writes about the ongoing interference by Members of Congress on the science behind the designation of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. His commentary, "What’s Science Got to Do with It?" appears in the current issue of April issue of the Synergist, a membership publication of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
Mirer's example concerns a rule published by EPA in December 2016 on testing formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products (e.g.,…
kkrisberg | April 18, 2017At Bloomberg BNA, Stephen Lee reports that with fears of deportation looming, undocumented immigrants are becoming afraid to access legal remedies when they’re injured on the job. The article notes that such immigrants are disproportionately employed in hazardous jobs and while they account for just 15 percent of the overall workforce, they account for 18 percent of occupational fatalities. Lee writes:
Sofia, a Mexican fieldworker in Santa Rosa, Calif., has a workers’ compensation case in the works after hurting her arm and shoulder pulling vine roots, requiring surgery. But she says she’s…
cmonforton | April 17, 2017OSHA’s list of bad actors has two new members. I just happened upon an updated list on the agency’s website of the employers OSHA designates as "severe violators." It indicates the two companies were added in the four weeks following President Trump’s inauguration. The list is dated April 7, 2017.
Mosier Industrial Services was involved in the gutting of a hundred year-old power plant in Columbus, Ohio. The project developers, Connect Realty and Schiff Capital Group, plan to convert the site into offices and event space.
OSHA inspectors issued citations on February 2 against Mosier…
kkrisberg | April 14, 2017Public health is in trouble.
Last month, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. It was more of an outline, really, and didn’t provide many details, but it did call for a nearly 18 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for block granting the budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, the White House supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. That repeal would also eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which now accounts for about 12 percent of CDC’s budget and funds critical public health…
cmonforton | April 13, 2017A coincidence? A tip from the well-connected? Divine intervention?
Whatever the reason, the timing couldn't have been more appropriate. Last weekend, a hundred physicians, patients, and trade unionists were attending the 13th Annual ADAO International Asbestos Awareness and Prevention Conference. At exactly the same time, comedian Bill Maher was skewering the Trump Administration and Republican lawmakers for their defense of asbestos.
Maher's smackdown of the Republican's anti-science and anti-health policies came in a pointed 5-minute segment on the April 7 episode of HBO's Real Time. The…
kkrisberg | April 12, 2017To get a clearer sense of just how bad our drug overdose problem has gotten, look no further than this year’s County Health Rankings. The annual report found that after years of declining premature deaths, that rate is on the rise and due primarily to overdose deaths. It means we could be seeing the first generation of American kids with shorter life expectancies than their parents.
“We often think of the opioid crisis either as happening in very rural communities or as an urban issue,” Kate Konkle, Action Center Team director for County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, told me. “But this is…
lborkowski | April 11, 2017The House of Representatives has passed two bills that, if they clear the Senate and are signed by President Trump, will make it much harder for EPA to do the important work of analyzing, warning about, and regulating health threats in the environment. The HONEST Act, introduced by House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Texas), would severely limit the research findings EPA could use in creating a wide range of communications, standards, and regulations. The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, introduced by Representative Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma), would…
Worker revolt in Myanmar smashes garment factory and apparel brands’ false promises of a better life
garrettbrown | April 10, 2017In February 2017, garment workers enraged by abusive and illegal working conditions stormed their factory and smashed $75,000 worth of equipment after attacking factory managers. The worker revolt in the one of the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the world also revealed the broken promises of international clothing brands that sweatshop apparel production would lead to better lives and “empowerment” of the overwhelmingly female garment workforce in Myanmar.
The Hangzhou Hundred-Tex Garment factory is Chinese-owned and exclusively produces for Swedish apparel giant Hennes &…
kkrisberg | April 8, 2017At the Center for Public Integrity, Talia Buford and Maryam Jameel investigate federal contractors that receive billions in public funds despite committing wage violations against their workers. In analyzing Department of Labor data on more than 1,100 egregious violators, the reporters found that federal agencies modified or granted contracts totaling $18 billion to 68 contractors with proven wage violations. The Department of Defense contracted with the most wage violators.
Under Obama, labor officials had attempted to address the problem with the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which…