cmonforton | May 31, 2010Speaking on a "matter of public concern," is protected speech, according to a federal jury in Becky McClain v. Pfizer, Inc. In this case, the jury found that being exposed at work to a genetically engineered virus or other biotech agents is indeed a legitimate matter of public concern. It involved Ms. Becky McClain who was employed as a molecular biologist by the pharmaceutical giant at their Groton, CT research center. She raised concerns in 2002-2003 about unsafe lab practices including procedures involving a genetically-modified viruses, (a pseudotype Lentivirus, HIV with a Vesicular…
lborkowski | May 31, 2010So far, 5,462 US service members have died from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the Reveres don't have their own blog anymore, I'll post what they've posted for Memorial Day in years past:
This is Priscilla Herdman's version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda."
lborkowski | May 31, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
Note from the editor of New Solutions: The Drawing Board: In the spirit of international solidarity, The Drawing Board has begun featuring articles from activists, researchers, and workers from around the world. It is our belief that we cannot effectively fight for social, economic and environmental justice in isolation, but instead must learn from and support one another. The parallels between Mexican workers' grievances and environmental catastrophes in Ethiopia are often…
egrossman | May 30, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
As of Saturday afternoon, May 29th, ten oil spill clean-up workers had been admitted to West Jefferson Medical Center (WJMC) in Marrero, Louisiana. All but two have been hospitalized suffering from chest pains, dizziness, headaches, and nausea. One crewmember admitted on the 29th had fallen and hit his head on a stair after wave mixed with oil had washed onto a deck, hospital spokesperson Taslin Alonzo told me about three hours after two workers were admitted Saturday. The other, who was working on what Alonzo called "an oil rig," was suffering from hypertension. All…
egrossman | May 28, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"All the data shows no toxic air concentrations from the oil spill where work is being performed," is what OSHA spokesperson Jason Surbey told me on Friday, May 21st.
But on the afternoon of May 26th, after crew members of three "vessels of opportunity" working in the Breton Sound area of the Gulf reported experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches, and chest pains - and one was medevaced by air to West Jefferson Hospital in Marrero, Louisiana and two others taken to the same hospital by ambulance - the Unified Command recalled all vessels of opportunity working in that…
lborkowski | May 28, 2010Officials from G8 countries will be gathering in Toronto next month, and scientific bodies from the eight countries (e.g., the Royal Society of Canada and US National Academy of Science) have developed a joint statement about what the G8 should do improve the health of women in children. They begin by citing the Millennium Development Goals of reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015; they note that we've seen "some progress in global child health" but the maternal-mortality reduction goal "remains a distant target." The statement…
lborkowski | May 27, 2010A New York Times article by Jane Gross highlights a costly healthcare problem: avoidable hospital readmissions, which affect one in five patients and account for $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget. (When people talk about readmissions, they're generally referring to an admission within 30 days of the previous admission for the same condition.)
When patients end up back in the hospital, it's often because their care didn't continue appropriately when they were first discharged. Patients leaving the hospital should receive detailed instructions about what they need to…
cmonforton | May 26, 2010In a blog post seven months ago, I gave federal OSHA credit for placing worker fatality information front-and-center on its homepage. The sobering feature deserving kudos was the scrolling list of fatal-injury incidents in which men and women died recently at US workplaces.
I remarked that the change by OSHA was a good start, and that I considered it a work in progress. It seemed that OSHA did as well. The first few weekly entries (here, here, here, here) did not include work-related fatalities reported to OSHA State Plan states. Federal OSHA indicated that some State Plans "elected not…
lborkowski | May 26, 2010On today's Morning Edition, Russell Lewis reported on the memorial service held in Jackson, Mississippi for the 11 workers who died when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th. Host David Greene noted that they've been called the "Forgotten 11," because so much attention has been focused on the oil leak rather than the lost workers.
The following workers were killed in the explosion:
Jason Anderson, 35, Bay City, TX
Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, Philadelphia, MS
Donald Clark, 49, Newellton, LA
Stephen Curtis, 39, Georgetown, LA
Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, Jonesville, LA
Karl Kleppinger,…
lborkowski | May 25, 2010A study published in the open-access journal BMC Immunology suggests an intriguing hypothesis: The explosion of spread of HIV in Africa and then worldwide in the 1950s might be partially explained by the eradication of smallpox and the discontinuation of smallpox vaccination campaigns.
The researchers - Raymond S. Weinstein, Michael M. Weinstein, Kenneth Alibek, Michael I. Bukrinsky, and Brichacek Beda - tested this hypothesis by collecting peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 20 subjects, half of whom had not been vaccinated against smallpox and half of whom had received the smallpox…
cmonforton | May 25, 2010I began writing this post as an open letter to Senator Graham and Administrator Reilly as they embarked in their work as co-chairs of the Presidential Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig catastrophe. I planned to urge them to read investigation reports on the BP Texas City disaster because both the US Chemical Safety Board and the Baker Panel challenged BP (and others in the oil and gas sector) from using "lost-time injury rates" to assess safety performance.
I quickly learned, however, that Mr. Graham and Mr. Reilly are not the only individuals who should read these reports. I'…
lborkowski | May 24, 2010The New York Times' Clifford J. Levy reports on violence against at journalists investigating corruption in the Moscow suburbs:
Mikhail Beketov had been warned, but would not stop writing. About dubious land deals. Crooked loans. Under-the-table hush money. All evidence, he argued in his newspaper, of rampant corruption in this Moscow suburb.
"Last spring, I called for the resignation of the city's leadership," Mr. Beketov said in one of his final editorials. "A few days later, my automobile was blown up. What is next for me?"
Not long after, he was savagely beaten outside his home and left…
lborkowski | May 21, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
If the recommendations of the just published President's Cancer Panel report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, become part of a comprehensive national policy agenda, the United States will have a remarkable new cancer prevention strategy - one that includes aggressive efforts to reduce and eliminate chemical exposures that can lead to and cause cancer, including those in the workplace.
Released on May 6th , the report (which includes over 450 sources) is remarkable for its embrace of environmental health science research that has not yet been…
lborkowski | May 20, 2010This week is Bike to Work Week, and tomorrow is Bike to Work Day (the League of American Bicyclists lists events here). I wouldn't have realized this if it weren't for this Washington Post article; cyclists are common enough here in DC that I'm not sure I'd notice a small uptick in their numbers. What I have noticed, though, is that the overall number of cyclists seems to have increased, probably due in part to the city's efforts to install more bike lanes and bike racks.
The Post article is accompanied by a database of 2008 bicycle fatality statistics. Only one cyclist was killed in DC that…
lborkowski | May 20, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
It's now a month since the Deepwater Horizon well exploded, and the oil continues to flow. By official count, the response now involves 27,400 civilian and military personnel, 11,000 volunteers, more than 1040 boats, dozens of aircraft, and multiple offshore drilling units.
As more and more people become involved, health and safety precautions for responders are becoming increasingly important. "How many lessons have we not learned from the Exxon Valdez experience and how many mistakes are being repeated in a worse way?" asks Mark Catlin, who has set up a Facebook group…
lborkowski | May 19, 2010It's only right that BP bear the cleanup costs in the Gulf - but their cleanup responsibilities shouldn't interfere with federal agencies doing their jobs. Two recent news accounts paint a disturbing picture of federal employees taking orders from the multinational corporation that's turned an already hard-hit part of our coastline into a disaster zone.
McClatchy Newspapers' Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof report that BP has released little information about how much oil is gushing out of its damaged well, and it will not make public the results of air sampling for cleanup workers. As…
lborkowski | May 18, 2010Although most of us are focusing on BP because of the oil rig explosion and gushing well in the Gulf, it's also important to consider the company's safety record at its refineries. Because I keep track of workplace disasters, I knew that BP had earned the distinction of having the worst refinery death toll in the industry. Until I read the results of a new Center for Public Integrity investigation, though, I had no idea just how much worse BP's refineries are compared to their industry peers.
Jim Morris and MB Pell report that when the worst safety violations identified by inspectors over the…
lborkowski | May 18, 2010For several years, health professionals have been concerned about the rise in infections from methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - a bacteria that's resistant to several of the antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. CDC estimates that in 2005, there were more than 94,000 MRSA infections in the US, and more than 18,000 of those patients died. The numbers are probably much higher now.
A study just published in the journal Pediatrics gives us new information about staph infections in hospitalized US children and how they're being treated. The results show a…
cmonforton | May 17, 2010Late last month, OSHA chief David Michaels announced the Severe Violator Enforcement Program, (SVEP) a new iniative targeted at
"recalcitrant employers who endanger workers by demonstrating indifference to their responsibilities under the law."
OSHA says once these bad actor employers are identified, it will conduct inspections at other worksites controlled by the same employer where similar hazards may be present. A good idea, right? It depends on whether you agree with OSHA's narrow definition of a "severe violator." I don't, because OSHA doesn't go far enough.
For example, would you…
lborkowski | May 16, 2010We're delighted and honored to be joining the ScienceBlogs community. It's a bittersweet occasion, because we're starting out here just as the Reveres are folding up their stellar public health blog Effect Measure. It's fair to say that The Pump Handle probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Reveres; they inspired us to launch our blog on Wordpress (old site here) back in November 2006, and have been a constant source of support as well as actual blog content. We're lucky that the Reveres have agreed to continue occasional posting here at TPH, so the blogosphere won't lose them…