by Eileen Senn, MS It seems obvious to many that respirators are needed to protect cleanup workers in the Gulf from inhaling air contaminants that are making some sick now and may make many more chronically ill in the future. I will describe a combination of political and scientific issues conspiring to prevent the needed respirators from being provided. They include: *Lack of focus on the adverse health effects of airborne contaminants *Limited air sampling *Outdated exposure limits *Oil company protocols for limiting respirator use *Concerns that respirators will worsen heat stress to…

By Elizabeth Grossman "This is the one thing that could destroy our culture and I don't want to see it happen," says Grand Isle, Louisiana resident Karen Hopkins, wiping at tears she's clearly fighting. Hopkins, a Louisiana native and long-time resident of Grand Isle, runs the office at Dean Blanchard Seafood. Blanchard typically buys 13 to 15 million pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp annually. Hopkins' house sits across from what should be a busy loading area for Dean Blanchard Seafood and no more than ten yards from a pier where boats that should be gearing up for a night out shrimping are coming…

It's appropriate for BP to dedicate $20 billion to an escrow fund for oil-spill claims, and I hope the fund's independent administration will allow for quick payment of claims. Nicholas Beaudrot points out that the fund's structure means BP has an incentive to resolve claims quickly - in contrast to the 20 years that it took ExxonMobil to pay claims related to the Valdez oil spill. Though the process of compensating financial losses will be complicated, it's far easier to quantify lost income than to tally the costs to Gulf residents' mental health. The New York Times' Mireya Navarro focuses…

In 1999, two machinists who worked next to each other at a Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in North Haven, Connecticut were diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and fatal brain cancer. Their wives started compliling information about other employees at the same company who'd received similar diagnoses, and focused attention on the workers' illneses until Pratt & Whitney agreed to hire University of Pittsburgh biostatistician Gary Marsh to conduct a study. Carole Bass reports for the New Haven Independent on the findings, the second phase of which have just been released: Marsh and…

If there was any doubt in your mind that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is detached from the reality of workers, worker rights and safety, he made it eminently clear in a letter he sent to his constituent Ms. Tammy Miser of Lexington, Kentucky. She'd written the Senator McConnell asking for his support for the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that was introduced in August 2009 by the late Senator Edward Kennedy. Instead of referring to the bill being considered in his own chamber of Congress, Senator McConnell writes:"After it was introduced, HR 2067 was referred to the…

By Anthony Robbins On 14 June 2010 stories appeared on the BBC and AFP. Google news displayed 70 story links. The European Journal of Epidemiology had published the research article online on 8 June. The very nice study strongly suggests that about 20% of sporadic cases of Legionnaire's disease in England and Wales may be caused by bacteria in windscreen wiper fluid. The exposure can be eliminated easily by adding "screenwash." It appears that the Legionella bacteria (Legionella pneumophila) can thrive in the warmed water that is held for the windshield washer system, often located in the…

It's been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn't quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one industrial hygienist's recommendations for how OSHA can make its online sampling data more useful: After reviewing OSHA's "Keeping Workers Safe During Oil Spill Response and Cleanup Operations" series of websites, I recommend that OSHA improve the information technology capacity of the sites and add…

by Elizabeth Grossman "The biggest thing we're going to see in the next month or so is heat. The hottest months are ahead. There's no shade on the water, on the beach or in the marshes. We're going to see an increased amount of heat exhaustion and heatstroke," Dr. James Callaghan, emergency room physician and vice president of hospital staff at the West Jefferson Medical Center (WJMC) in Marrero, Louisiana told me on Saturday morning June 12. The hospital has admitted eight spill response workers thus far but, said Callaghan, "There are triage centers before they get here, so very few…

Both OSHA and BP have set up webpages that offer their air monitoring procedures and results related to the Gulf oil disaster. Several worker health and safety experts have examined the data and offered interpretations of the results, including Eileen Senn, a former OSHA inspector. She reviewed BP's June 9, 2010 Personal Exposure Monitoring Results Summary, which includes a graphical analysis of 2,100 personal samples collected to-date for benzene, total hydrocarbons, and 2-butoxy ethanol, an ingredient in the dispersant Corexit EC9527A. Senn notes: "The document provides no information on…

James Surowiecki's latest New Yorker piece tackles the problem of weakened federal agencies failing to get tough on companies that need it. He notes that leading up to the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Minerals Management Service officials "had let oil companies shortchange the government on oil-lease payments, accepted gifts from industry representatives, and, in some cases, literally slept with the people they were regulating." And he gives other examples: Mining regulators allowed operators like Massey Energy to flout safety rules. Financial regulators let A.I.G. write more than half a…

I noticed today on OSHA's website a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the US Coast Guard (USCG). Under the heading "Information Sharing: Enforcement," OSHA says it: "will notify the Federal On Scene Coordinator (FOSC) when it intends to take any enforcement action against BP, BP's contractors, or any other employer engaged in response activities." I must be missing something here because the OSH Act is pretty darn explicit in prohibiting advance notice of an enforcement action. It's a big no-no, punishable with as much as a $1,000 fine or as much as 6 months in jail. The statute…

Senator Chris Dodd held a hearing yesterday to discuss his Livable Communities Act, which would provide grant funding for communities to plan and implement strategies to improve livability. In his statement, he explains: This legislation will provide resources for comprehensive planning. The design of our communities is often seen as primarily a local issue, but the enduring consequences of how we lay out our communities are national in scope. New studies show that 'location-efficient' homes are less likely to risk foreclosure. Less compact communities that force residents to rely solely on…

As Coal Tattoo reports in "MSHA lost a major 'pattern of violation' case against Massey," the federal mine safety agency was foiled in its effort to place Massey Energy's Tiller No.1 mine on a pattern of violations. This particular underground coal mine is located in Tazewell, Virginia and had dozens of S&S citations for violating mandatory health and safety standards. S&S violations are NOT nit-picky offenses that you'd shrug your shoulders at---they are serious infractions with a reasonable likelihood that a worker could suffer a serious injury, even death. MSHA inspectors had…

President Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he sounds like a great guy for the job. Julie Rovner reported for Morning Edition earlier today that Republicans are stalling his nomination, which isn't out of the ordinary these days. But the part of her story that really pissed me off was this snippet from Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), who said, "Dr. Berwick is the perfect nominee for a president whose aim has always been to save money by rationing health care." I would really, really like it if everyone who gets involved in the…

Melanie Trottman reported in the Wall Street Journal last week that US Representatives James Oberstar and Jerrold Nadler have demanded that Gulf response and recovery workers be provided with respirators (among other protective equipment), but OSHA doesn't think respirators should be required: David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Department of Labor's OSHA, said in an interview Thursday that based on test results so far, cleanup workers are receiving "minimal" exposure to airborne toxins. OSHA will require that BP provide certain protective clothing, but not respirators. The "based on…

By Elizabeth Grossman Expressions of concern for oil spill response workers' health and safety grew this past week as reports arrived by way of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network that BP was denying workers' requests for respirators. On June 4th, the Wall Street Journal reported that Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and James Oberstar (D-Minn) had written to the EPA and Department of Labor demanding that all response workers be provided with "proper protective equipment, including respirators." Anna Hrybyk, program manager of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, also reports that in…

As a group, scientists generally grasp the importance of good data collection systems - but federal-agency budgets rarely let scientists collect as much data as they'd like. Trimming funds for monitoring or surveillance programs may seem like the least painful budget choice when money's tight, but then sometimes it turns out that relatively small savings from such cuts have huge costs further down the line. That seems to be the case when it comes to data on currents in the Gulf of Mexico, as Paul Voosen reports for Greenwire: For more than a decade, scientists have called for federal funding…

The Economist recently published a special report on water, which summarizes the difficulty of ensuring adequate clean water supplies for a growing global population. (It also touches on the related challenge of sanitation, which affects water quality.) Agriculture accounts for nearly 70% of the world's water use, although that number varies by region. In the US, 41% of water goes to agriculture; in India, the number is close to 90%. India also has the distinction of being the country that draws the most groundwater, the Economist reports. With most areas subsidizing electricity, it's…

We've been following the story ( see here, here, and here) of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq - which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. National Guard soldiers from four states were stationed there; many of them suffered nosebleeds and other nasal problems while at the water plant in 2003, and have continued to suffer from respiratory problems and other chronic illnesses since returning home. Three have died of cancer. British soldiers and employees of KBR and the Iraqi Oil Company have…

DemFromCT had a great post up at Daily Kos this past weekend about risk communication. He considers the somewhat unusual circumstances of the Gulf oil spill, noting, "unlike pandemics and hurricanes, this volatile mixture in the water has an equally volatile mix of politics, companies, government and media to sort out policy and communication." The post also includes insights from risk communication expert Peter Sandman, who (with input from Jody Lanard) gave a detailed response to this question from DemFromCT: Given the potential for failure of the top kill approach, and the length of time…