lborkowski | March 17, 2011Earlier this week, the Geiger Gibson/ RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative released a policy research brief that estimates the impact of the House of Representatives' proposed reduction in funding to community health centers. (Full disclosure: the Geiger Gibson program is part of the George Washington University's School of Public Health & Health Services, where I work, and I've taken classes taught by Sara Rosenbaum, one of the authors of the brief.) I'm sure most readers won't be surprised to learn that cuts to community health center funding won't really save money…
lborkowski | March 16, 2011The workers remaining at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station are braving extremely risky conditions as they try to avert a nuclear catastrophe. They are working to keep fuel rods - both those inside reactors and in the spent rods stored in ponds - cool enough to avert a Chernobyl-type meltdown, which would spew radioactive particles across the region. The most recent reports state that there are 50 workers remaining at the power station; all others have been evacuated as radiation levels have risen.
The New York Times' Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi describe the workers'…
cmonforton | March 16, 2011Les Skramstad was a good, decent man who died in January 2007 from mesothelioma at 70 years young. Mesothelioma is a rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Mr. Skramstad was a miner and laborer at the infamous vermiculite mine at Zonolite Mountain in Libby, Montana. Mr. Skramstad's death was clearly work-related, but when the Labor Department's annual census of work-related deaths was published the following year, reporting 5,488 fatal work injuries, his death was not included. As noted in Part 1 of this series, our nation's official count of work-related deaths is a census of fatal…
As world watches Japan's nuclear plants, damage to manufacturing infrastructure poses chemical risks
egrossman | March 15, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
After posting yesterday's story, I began to learn what a hub of chemical-intensive industry the region of Japan most directly affected by the earthquake an tsunami is. Hit with varying degrees of damage from the earthquake and tsunami are more than a dozen major petrochemical plants, most, according to a March 14 Goldman Sachs memo to investors, built in the 1970s. In addition, numerous factories that manufacture agrochemicals, silicon wafers, semiconductors, photovoltaic cells, and other high-tech items have all suffered damage as have warehouses and shipping container…
egrossman | March 14, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
Even before news of the crisis at the Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear power plants damaged by Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami arrived, raising public health concerns to an alarming level, the scenes of destruction prompted many questions about how public health - and that of first responders - would be protected during immediate rescue efforts, and later as clean up and restoration get underway. The awful loss of life demands much of our attention, but it's also essential to consider future health issues for those working on rescue and recovery.
Right now…
lborkowski | March 14, 2011With nearly one-third of US healthcare spending going to hospital care, it's natural that people would be looking for ways to trim spending on hospital services. A new study just published in the journal Health Affairs reports that seriously ill hospital patients receiving consultations from palliative care teams can incur lower costs. For this study's population - Medicaid patients facing serious or life-threatening illnesses admitted to four New York State hospitals - the authors found that patients who received palliative care consultations incurred costs that averaged $6,900 less than…
lborkowski | March 11, 2011Earlier this week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food released a report stating that agroecology - basically, sustainable agriculture - can double global food production over the next decade. Specifically, agroecology can raise production in the poor, food-deficit countries that most need additional crops. The techniques, which include using plants and beneficial animals in place of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, can be easily adopted by smallholder farmers. And these farmers' additional earnings will in turn support local sellers and service providers, who don't tend to…
lborkowski | March 10, 2011Celeste wrote last week about how the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. broke the story of how a previously unpublished report sent to Congress by the Mine Safety and Health Administration two weeks before the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster warned about serious enforcement lapses, including incomplete inspections and inadequate enforcement actions.
In addition to that story, another of Ward's Charleston Gazette articles last week highlighted another MSHA issue related to that mine disaster, which killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia:
U.S. Mine…
cmonforton | March 9, 2011"Death takes no holidays in industry and commerce," is how Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz described the toll of on-the-job death and disability for U.S. workers. The Secretary's remarks in 1968 were part of congressional hearings on legislation that ultimately established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He suggested that because most work-related fatalities and injuries happen one or two at a time, day in and day out, the carnage continues"because people don't realize its magnitude, and can't see the blood on the things they buy, on the food they eat, and the…
lborkowski | March 8, 2011For today's celebration of International Women's Day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarks:
One hundred years ago, when the world first commemorated International Women's Day, gender equality and women's empowerment were largely radical ideas. On this centenary, we celebrate the significant progress that has been achieved through determined advocacy, practical action and enlightened policy making. Yet, in too many countries and societies, women remain second-class citizens.
He goes on to describe violence against women (including sexual aggression in conflict), women and children's…
egrossman | March 8, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
It's now almost eleven months since the BP/Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers, and almost eight months since the damaged well was capped. While the emergency phase of this disaster is over, the assessment of and response to its long-term impacts are just now getting underway. On February 28th, the Gulf Ecosystem Restoration Task Force held the second of its five planned meetings - this one in New Orleans - and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) launched its long-term study to evaluate health effects of the oil spill…
lborkowski | March 8, 2011Given how many complaints we've been hearing lately about wasteful government spending, I thought this might be a good time to highlight some lesser-known, worthwhile government-funded programs that promote public health. (Core agency functions, like EPA's Clean Air Act enforcement, are also crucial for public health, but I trust this audience is already fairly familiar with them.)
One example - which comes immediately to mind because we have one affiliated with our department here at the George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services - is pediatric environmental…
lborkowski | March 7, 2011As part of a series on the "penny-and-pound foolish cuts the House Republicans want to impose," the New York Times editorial board lambastes a proposal to cut federal funding to Poison Control Centers from $29 million (Obama's request) to $2 million. This federal money only covers about 20% of the centers' costs, but slashing it will likely force many centers to close. This would be a shame, the editorial board explains, because poison control centers actually save money:
The nation's network of 57 poison control centers takes four million calls a year about people who may have been exposed…
lborkowski | March 4, 2011Earlier this week, the EPA released a report that quantifies costs and benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments - and, surprise, surprise, the benefits substantially outweigh the costs: $2 trillion vs. $65 billion in 2020.
Specifically, The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020 evaluates the costs and benefits of programs implemented pursuant to the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, comparing today's outcomes with what would've been expected had control programs remained only as stringent as they were before the 1990 changes took effect. The figures cover not only the…
cmonforton | March 3, 2011Editors of The (WV) Charleston Gazette had perfect timing. On the morning of a congressional oversight hearing on the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration's (MSHA) performance, their front page featured an article by reporter Ken Ward Jr. about incomplete inspections and inadequate enforcement actions in 2009 in at least 25 of the agency's field offices. In "Report details MSHA lapses prior to disaster," Ward describes a previously unpublished letter sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee just two weeks before the Upper Big Branch disaster. The letter summarized…
lborkowski | March 2, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Deborah Blum at Slate: Bring Back the Poison Squad ("If we look back to a similar crisis of food safety in the last century, we see that federal regulators were willing to risk their lives to protect the rest of us.")
Jenny Gold of Kaiser Health News on NPR: In Pa., Low-income Adults Soon May Be Uninsured (and check out Steve Inskeep's interview with Julie Rovner, which followed this story when it aired)
Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, and M.B. Pell at the Center for Public Integrity: Regulatory Flaws, Repeated Violations Put Oil Refinery Workers at Risk
The…
lborkowski | March 1, 2011Helen Pearson has just written a fascinating Nature News article about a British cohort study - the National Survey of Health and Development, run by the Medical Research Council - that's been following more than 5,000 subjects since their births in 1946. Cohort studies take groups of people who share a common characteristic, such as being born at a particular time or place or sharing a particular job, and follow them over a span of time. (In prospective cohort studies, the study period begins with enrollment; in retrospective cohort studies, medical records are used to study subjects' pasts…
cmonforton | February 28, 2011Roxanne Moyer wondered why managers at her husband's worksite would allow an obvious dangerous condition to exist. Workers could be so "close to molten steel [that it] just poured over on them." Her husband, Samuel Moyer, 32 died earlier this month at Arcelor Mittal's LaPlace, Lousiania steel mill in exactly that way. He was fatally burned with molten steel.
Mrs. Moyer sounds like a generous and forgiving soul, saying:"I don't want it to happen to anybody else. And they've already changed things there. We've talked to fellow workers, and they've already put up a shield there and you can't…
lborkowski | February 25, 2011For its 40th anniversary, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has compiled a timeline of key milestones during its history. The big picture is a positive one:
Although accurate statistics were not kept at the time, it is estimated that in 1970 around 14,000 workers were killed on the job. That number fell to approximately 4,340 in 2009. At the same time, U.S. employment has almost doubled and now includes over 130 million workers at more than 7.2 million worksites. Since the passage of the OSH Act, the rate of reported serious workplace injuries and illnesses has declined from…
lborkowski | February 24, 2011We're hearing a lot of rhetoric about the need to slash government spending, so it's a good time to remind everyone that there's no such thing as a free lunch - and if you think you're getting a free lunch, it might be loaded with pathogens.
Maryn McKenna, writing at Superbug about a New England Journal of Medicine study, has an illustrative example: the Great Tomato Scare of 2008. Between May and August of 2008, 1,499 people (and probably many more) fell ill from the Saintpaul strain of Salmonella, and two people died. The Food and Drug Administration initially thought tomatoes were to…