lborkowski | February 23, 2011By Dick Clapp
An ambitious paper was released in Boston last week, with subsequent media coverage in local, national and international outlets (see, for example the New York Times' Green Blog and Reuters). The first author, Paul Epstein, was interviewed on the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise, which was anchored in the Boston Harbor as part of its month-long "Coal Free Future Tour." The paper, which was just published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, was the result of a two-year collaborative effort that I participated in, as did Celeste Monforton, other academics from…
egrossman | February 22, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
As I've watched the hearings House Republicans have been holding over the past couple of weeks on the economic impact of environmental and occupational health and safety regulations, I've been thinking about what I've learned about and seen of the working and environmental conditions in places that are now the hub of world manufacturing. I've been picturing the smog that hangs over Chinese cities. I've been thinking about the fatal despair of young high-tech workers at Foxconn and Samsung factories in China and South Korea, about the depressed wages and severe working…
cmonforton | February 21, 2011Freshman Congressman Larry D. Bucshon (R) of Evansville, Indiana is a cardiothoracic surgeon. His father was an underground coal miner and a member of the United Mine Workers Union for 37 years. Both his grandparents were coal miners. But, Republican-controlled Capitol Hill is now the Twilight Zone when I heard him say the following last week at a congressional hearing:"I see a lot of patients with workplace related respiratory problems, some of which, to put it bluntly, are their own issue because they refuse to wear safety equipment regardless of whether there are regulations in place to…
lborkowski | February 18, 2011The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting in DC this week, and the organization is presenting awards to "professional journalists for distinguished reporting for a general audience." An endowment from the Kavli Foundation funds the awards program, which gives $3,000 and a plaque to each winner.
I wasn't surprised to see that the winners included Charles Duhigg's New York Times "Toxic Waters" series and Richard Harris and Alison Richards' NPR series "Follow the Science: Calculating the Amount of Oil and Gas in the Gulf Oil Spill" (here and here, too…
cmonforton | February 17, 2011Budget proposals are flying up and down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill, as lawmakers and the President wrestle with funding plans for the current and next fiscal years. The House began debate this week on HR 1 (359 pages), a bill to appropriate funds to federal agencies for the remainder of FY 2011 (i.e., now through September 30, 2011). Many public protection agencies take a big hit under the House Republican's plan. The Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would take a 20% cut and the Environmental…
lborkowski | February 17, 2011Cross-posted from the American Geophysical Union's GeoSpace blog.
Even though the deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti is now spreading more slowly, health officials are still working to prevent as many new cases as possible. Detailed models of the disease's spread help those in charge of making public health decisions understand the effectiveness of control measures, from vaccines to investments in clean water supply and education.
A new study by Enrico Bertuzzo and colleagues just accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters looks at how the Haitian cholera outbreak is likely to…
lborkowski | February 16, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
Since release of its Final Report to the President on January 11th, the National Oil Spill Commission has released five additional papers (called "working papers") reviewing aspects of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster - three on February 3rd and two on February 8th. On February 11th, National Oil Spill Commissioners Don Boesch and Terry Garcia testified before two House subcommittees. The final report, the working papers, and the Commissioners' prepared testimony all take a critical look at the industry's preparation for such a disaster, examine the policies and…
lborkowski | February 15, 2011The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a report on the future of global health journalism, and it's not surprising to hear that the traditional model of covering global health is crumbling. KFF commissioned journalists Nellie Bristol and John Donnelly to conduct this research, and their interviews with 51 stakeholders found that challenges abound. Budget pressures on mainstream news media have reduced the number of reporters on this beat and restrained their ability to travel. Freelancers struggle to find receptive outlets for their stories and stretch paltry story payments to cover…
cmonforton | February 14, 2011Annual sales revenue in the nation's restaurant industry tops $515 billion, but few of the 10.3 million workers in the industry earn a living wage. Those are the findings released today of comprehensive surveys of working conditions for 1,700 restaurant workers employed in Washington DC, Miami and Los Angeles. To date, more than 4,300 workers have been interviewed in eight cities in a project coordinated by Restaurant Opportunities Center United.
In Miami and Los Angeles, 75% and 71% of the restaurant workers surveyed, respectively, have no health insurance; the figure was 48% for…
lborkowski | February 11, 2011A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times about a new practice by some employers: refusing to hire smokers:
More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity, reduce health care costs and encourage healthier living.
The policies reflect a frustration that softer efforts -- like banning smoking on company grounds, offering cessation programs and increasing health care premiums for smokers -- have not been powerful-enough incentives to quit.
The new rules…
lborkowski | February 10, 2011Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs: On Labor ("My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into the world nearly killed his mother.")
Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: Dieting, Stress, and the Changing Brain.
Robert Reich's Blog at the Christian Science Monitor: US Chamber of Commerce: Obama makes a bargain
Jon R. Luoma at Yale Environment 360: Why Does Energy Efficiency's Promise Remain Unfulfilled?
Alice Bell at The Guardian's Notes & Theories blog: Sexual discrimination against women in science may be institutional -- and also one of the pieces she links to, Kathy…
lborkowski | February 9, 2011Last week, Mark Bittman published the New York Times column "A Food Manifesto for the Future," in which he proposed ways to "make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring." Among his suggestions was outlawing concentrated animal feeding operations, so it wasn't surprising to see a letter to the editor from Randy Spronk, Chairman of the Environment Committee of the National Pork Producers Council in the Times a few days later (hat tip to Maryn McKenna's Twitter feed). It's interesting to see how Spronk responded to…
cmonforton | February 8, 2011I was already tired of President Obama repeating the Republican's rhetoric about big, bad regulations, how they stifle job creation, put an unnecessary burden on businesses, and make our economy less competitive. He did so last month in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and in his State of the Union address. But yesterday, the White House went too far.
In advance of the President's speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) threw two OSHA initiatives under the bus. Right after mentioning President Obama's January 18…
lborkowski | February 7, 2011Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine examined data from 71 Illinois and North Carolina hospitals and found that "patient deaths from pneumonia and acute myocardial infarction were significantly more likely in hospitals where nurses reported schedules with long work hours," reports Laura Walter in EHS Today. (The study itself appears in the January/February issue of Nursing Research.)
During nursing shortages in the 1980s, many hospitals switched nurses from 8-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts, and the pattern has…
lborkowski | February 4, 2011Ben McGrath has an excellent article on "the NFL and the concussion crisis" in the January 31st issue of the New Yorker. It's well worth a read (though it might change the way you see the Superbowl), but the thing I want to highlight is the roles of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times in raising the public's awareness of a problem that pervades football. (For our international readers, I'm referring to the US version of football - I realize that word means something different in the rest of the world.)
Specifically, the problem is the effects of repeated brain trauma, which football players…
cmonforton | February 3, 2011The contrast is striking. Look at the screenshot of the outcome of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' (OIRA) review of two Labor Department rules to address flaws in our worker health and safety system. One is a proposal by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to crack down on mine operators who habitually violate mine safety regulations. No more warning letters or slaps on the wrist. Once a mine operator is notified he has a "pattern of violations," a single serious violation of the law observed by an inspector at any time in the next 90 days will result in…
lborkowski | February 2, 2011Some villages in Pakistan's Sindh province are still underwater following August's floods, and a new UNICEF survey has found that nearly one-fourth of the children under five there are malnourished. The deputy head of UNICEF Pakistan, Karen Allen, calls conditions "shockingly bad" and compares them to "the worst of the famine in Ethiopia, Darfur, and Chad." The Guardian's Declan Walsh notes that other parts of the country are successfully recovering from the floods (the number of people in camps and roadside settlements has dropped from 3.3 million in October to 166,000), but Sindh "has long…
cmonforton | February 1, 2011The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP) is known for challenging the status quo. Its scientists and policy analysts refuse to accept we have to live in a world where parents are worried about toxic toys, or companies feel forced to choose between earning profits and protecting the environment. Leave it to LCSP researchers to describe six cases of systemic worker health and safety failures, yet manage to identify small successes or opportunities to create them. That's the Lowell way:"...infuse hope and opportunity into a system that may appear severely broken."
In "Lessons…
egrossman | January 31, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
The 398-page National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling final Report to the President on the Deepwater Horizon: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, released January 11, offers a scathing critique of the offshore oil-drilling industry's approach to safety and of the U.S. government's systemic failure to ensure that safety. It also includes a valuable history of the industry that helps explain - but does not excuse - the structural complexities and shortcomings of the response to the disaster, deficiencies that…
lborkowski | January 28, 2011Atul Gawande's latest New Yorker article, "The Hot Spotters," is a must-read for anyone concerned about the out-of-control growth of US healthcare costs (and that description should apply to everyone in this country). It's about possible solutions to the problem of the highest-cost patients, who account for a disproportionate share of healthcare spending but often aren't getting the kind of care that could really improve their lives. Gawande visits several organizations that are testing out ways to deliver better, more cost-effective care to patients with multiple chronic conditions and high…