You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2007.
Yesterday, the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on “Allegations of Political interference with the Work of Government Climate Change Scientists.” As committee chair Henry Waxman noted in his opening statement, the committee had been investigating this matter for several months, and had good reason to be concerned:
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Les Skramstad was a good, decent man. He died earlier this month at 70-years young, from damage inflicted years earlier by greedy and reckless employers. Read the rest of this entry »
When workplace disasters make headlines, worker health and safety advocates have an opportunity to push for better legislation and enforcement. Recent news stories follow up on the response to last year’s mining disasters and the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery. (As always, Jordan Barab’s Confined Space has comprehensive back stories to these disasters.) Plus, there’s news about police officer deaths, prison labor, and a safety fine for Tyson’s.
by Les Boden
Yesterday’s Washington Post has a long story about Mercury Morris, star running back of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in modern NFL history. Morris’ neck was broken in a 1973 game on national television, and he has had significant physical and emotional problems ever since. He also has been fighting, unsuccessfully, for work-related disability payments for twenty years.
One of the best ways that mothers, fathers, grandparents, and caregivers can find out about hazardous agents in their homes, communities, and workplaces is by reading the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). EHP is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an agency created in 1966 by the Surgeon General as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). EHP is published monthly and can be accessed on-line at no cost. Some of the scientific articles published in EHP may be too technical for some readers, but the journal’s Environews section is written with the general public in mind. Environews translates complex, cutting-edge scientific topics into narratives that are understandable and accessible to everyone. It is a breath of uncontaminated air by those of us outside the NIH. Read the rest of this entry »
Some of you may recall Mike Casey’s compelling exposé in the Kansas City Star (Wayback Machine version here) regarding OSHA’s outrageously low fines for safety violations– even those directly responsible for serious injuries to or even deaths of unsuspecting workers. While OSHA is supposedly committed to levy fines “sufficient to serve as an effective deterrent to violations”—the punishment rarely fits the crime. According to former OSHA assistant secretary Jerry Scannell, (1989-1992), the current fines are “almost like chump change with some companies.”
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The pharmaceutical industry was a hot topic in the blogosphere this week:
Cervantes at Stayin’ Alive advocates for a ban on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising (as opposed to the proposed legislation likely to come from the pharma industry).
Orac at Respectful Insolence has a different take on the “DCA is a miracle cancer drug Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about” idea that’s spreading through the blogosphere.
Andrew Leonard at How the World Works knows what will make your sympathy for Big Pharma disappear.
And, of course, there were plenty of interesting posts on other topics:
By David Michaels
Yesterday’s post by Les Boden on workers’ compensation fraud by employers brings up an important question: How much fraud is there in the comp system and who is responsible?
Insurers and employers have worked diligently to convince the public that the workers’ compensation rolls are filled with malingerers, intent on ripping off the system. The evidence is always anecdotal, like surreptitiously filmed clips of the supposedly disabled workers doing the mambo. If injured workers get the message that they will be labeled as “malingerers” if they receive apply workers comp payments, they are more likely to use their own resources to cover their medical and lost wage costs, subsidizing unsafe employers.
When I reviewed the literature on comp fraud (big file here), it became clear to me that employers are responsible for far more fraud than are workers, and that, for all the outrageous anecdotes, actual investigations into worker fraud find few cases of substance.
Massey Energy, a major US coal mine operator, is boasting that its safety program has won the “highly coveted” Golden Pyramid Award. Isn’t it a bit peculiar that a mining company where three workers were killed in 2006 would be recognized for its workplace safety and health program? And, we wonder what kind of organization would give Massey this distinction?
by Les Boden
Today, The New York Times reports on an important study that shows us the tip of the iceberg of employer workers’ compensation fraud.
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Yesterday, Jordan Barab mothballed his blog Confined Space, and workers and worker advocates lost a powerful online resource. The good news is that we’ve gained a political resource, since Jordan’s departure from the blogosphere is due to his new staff position on the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. Still, we’ll all miss the combination of up-to-the-minute news, biting commentary, and ceaseless advocacy for worker health and safety that have characterized Confined Space since its inception in 2003. (See Revere’s post yesterday for more on how much Jordan has contributed.)
Cross-posted at Effect Measure by Revere
Tonight The Reveres are putting on their party clothes and headed for Jordan Barab’s place, Confined Space. Truthfully, this party is also a wake, because Jordan is closing up shop tonight and has invited everyone over (that means you, too) to celebrate his last post. We’ll be gathering in the Comment Thread. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
NIOSH scientist Patricia Sullivan has just published a very important study that reminds us (as if any reminder were needed) that there really is no safe level of asbestos exposure.
The study looked at the causes of death among workers involved in mining, milling and processing asbestos-containing vermiculite in WR Grace’s plant in Libby, Montana. Dr. Sullivan found increased risk of lung cancer among workers whose lifetime asbestos exposure was only slightly higher than they would receive working a lifetime at the current OSHA standard.
by Revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
The University of California Regents (their Board of Trustees) is facing a thorny issue: should researchers in the University of California system be banned from taking research support from the tobacco industry? Two conflicting imperatives, one, unfettered freedom to pursue research wherever it leads; the other, the need for some constraints. Not anything goes, even in the hallowed halls of higher learning. Let me be clear. I think the chief executives of tobacco companies are aiding and abetting, if not committing, homicide, by promoting an addiction to a fatal product for money. I favor prosecuting them fully if they have committed fraud, or at least suing them for every penny they have and then some. That said, I still don’t favor a ban. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »
The Science Blogging Conference, held this past weekend at UNC-Chapel Hill, wasn’t just for bloggers. Many of the attendees, particularly science students and educators, came to learn how they could use blogs, and some of them launched their own blogs over the course of the weekend. The journalists in attendance seemed to be immersed in the blogosphere already: some were blogging as part of their jobs, some relied on bloggers as sources, and some were both bloggers and journalists.
During the conference, I found it particularly interesting to hear different conversations about how blogging and more traditional forms of science journalism complement and conflict with one another.
Mining companies opposed to a health standard to protect underground miners from diesel particulate matter (DPM) finally had their day in court. The morning proceeding featured remarks about tail-wagging dogs and coal-mine canaries, presented before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Industry attorneys urged the Court to vacate the exposure limits and other provisions of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) 2001 DPM rule. From my vantage point sitting on the public gallery benches, Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsberg, Senior Judge Harry T. Edwards and Judge David B. Sentelle seemed unimpressed by the industry’s arguments.
There have been a number of thoughtful and challenging comments on the future of safety and health posted in the past week. I want to acknowledge some of these and also to suggest more discussion about the principles that might help choose which potential actions to increase worker protection should get priority attention. Read the rest of this entry »
Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth reports on the newest research on PBDEs (levels of this flame retardant in household dust correlate to levels in breast milk) and gives an update on Washington state’s proposed PBDE ban.
Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has an update on Eli Lilly’s attempts to block the online distribution of documents that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa.
Mead Over at Global Health Policy commends the 22 Members of Congress who wrote to the US Trade Representative in support of Thailand’s exercise of a compulsory license for the AIDS drug Efavirenz, and provides background and analysis on this issue.
By David Michaels
Earlier today, President Bush took another step to limit the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the nation’s health and environment.
The President signed amendments to Executive Order (E.O.) 12866, further centralizing the control the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has over agency activities, and making it more difficult for public health agencies to issue regulations or even guidance documents.
OMB Watch had just posted its preliminary analysis of the amendments. Here’s an excerpt:
By Liz Borkowski
There’s an article making its way around the internet warning that a lobbying reform law currently in the Senate will require bloggers who criticize Congress and reach audiences of more than 500 to register and file quarterly reports with Congress — or risk jail time.
Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority decided to investigate this, and found no such provision in the bill. In fact, he cites passages of the bill stating that it covers paid attempts to stir up the public on behalf of a client. Sums above $25,000 also need to be involved. In fact, this piece of the legislation seems specifically designed to crack down on astroturfing, a tactic that industry PR firms use to manufacture grassroots support for their positions.
by Liz Borkowski
Via the Center for Media and Democracy, I’ve just learned about an article from the journal Tobacco Control that provides insight into yet another instructive facet of the Tobacco Wars: Philip Morris’s plan to combat the declining social acceptability of smoking. The article authors – P.A. McDaniel, E.A. Smith, and R.E. Malone – examined documents made public through litigation against the tobacco industry for details on the industry’s “Project Sunshine” plan, which was launched in 1996 to combat the declining social acceptability of smoking. In particular, they focused on the company’s “Fair Play” strategy, which was designed to limit the effectiveness of the tobacco control movement.
Since other tactics honed by the tobacco industry (e.g., manufacturing uncertainty, slamming opponents’ science as “junk”) have been adopted so successfully by other industries fighting regulation, this strategy is probably already in wide use by other industries fighting attempts to regulate or reduce use of their products. In fact, now that I’ve read this article, I can easily imagine the playbook that would look something like this:
By David Michaels
Later today, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board will hold a public meeting to consider issuing an Emergency Temporary Standard to protect workers exposed to the chemical diacetyl. This chemical, a primary component of artificial butter flavor, has been implicated as a cause of bronchiolitis obliterans, a debilitating and sometimes fatal lung disease.
Yesterday, on behalf of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP), I sent the Standards Board new evidence: an unpublished Dutch study reporting three cases of the rare lung disease among workers at a diacetyl factory.
By Sheldon Krimsky
ExxonMobil has already come under scrutiny for funding global warming deniers, but the company has also funded research that raises concerns about conflict of interest in litigation research. The company began funding litigation research after being hit with punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill, and then cited that research in an appeal that ultimately reduced those damages by $2 billion.
By David Michaels
The outbreak of severe lung disease caused by exposure to diacetyl, the chemical that makes food taste like artificial butter flavor, is growing. According to the California Department of Health Services, there are now eight known cases of severe obstructive lung disease among workers exposed to diacetyl, with three more reported cases under investigation.
How many cases are occurring in other states? No one knows, because California is the only state in the country that is actively collecting information. What’s striking about the California cases is that none of the workers are employed in microwave popcorn plants, the factories where the first cases of diacetyl-caused lung disease were identified. (The identification of the first cases of bronchiolitis obliterans at these factories is the reason the disease was given the now out-dated label “popcorn workers’ lung.”)
The food industry is a national one – food factories around the country use the same chemicals that are making workers sick in California. It has been almost six months since a group of unions and scientists petitioned OSHA for an emergency rule to protect workers from diacetyl.
OSHA has yet to take any action in response (this remains a case study in regulatory failure). The states, especially those with their own OSHA plans, can act on their own. Perhaps state epidemiologists in the other 49 will read the description of the known cases in California, compiled by Barbara Materna, PhD, CIH, Chief, Occupational Health Branch, California Department of Health Services, and begin to gather comparable information that could lead to state action to protect food indsutry workers. Here’s a portion of the California report:
These eight workers are 29 to 49 years old. They all live in Southern California, where the majority of flavor manufacturing plants are located. Six are male, and two are female. All are Latino, and half are known to prefer to be interviewed in Spanish. Of the six for which smoking history is known, none have ever been smokers. Only one worker is known to have had asthma as a child; the majority did not have asthma or other breathing problems before working in this industry.
If you’ve got a long weekend coming up, what better way to spend it than by reading the best science blog posts? Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock has links to the 50 posts chosen for the Science Blogging Anthology.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere …
Thanks to those of you who have responded so far to the draft paper, “Getting Home Safe and Sound? OSHA at Thirty Five,” which was posted here several days ago. Many people have agreed with the need for this dialogue and indicated the intent to contribute to it. Comments so far have supported the need for a generic safety and health program rule; raised cautions about what’s said in a public forum; urged stricter penalties when employers negligently violate OSHA rules; expressed the need to de-politicize OSHA; endorsed the idea of third party inspections and proposed examining the SEC audit system as a possible inspection model; offered suggestions for making the issue relevant to the broader public, activating workers’ families and journalists, and framing the issue differently for different groups; and questioned the differences between cultures in environmental health and occupational health. Thanks for the excellent start to this discussion. While I welcome comments and suggestions on all the themes and ideas in the paper I am especially interested in reactions to two sections.
By David Michaels
“Risk assessment data can be like a captured spy: if you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know.”
- William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Administrator,
Risk assessment, explicit and implicit, is the motor that drives regulation. It can be a valuable tool for assisting regulatory agencies in selecting priorities and setting standards. It is also a means through which opponents of regulation can manufacture uncertainty and impede implementation of appropriate public health and environmental protection programs.
The failed White House proposal to restructure federal risk assessment activities (see Bob Shull’s post about the National Academy of Sciences’ SCATHING review of the proposal) is a terrific lens to expose how various powerful players have promoted their version of risk assessment to slow down or stop regulation.
by Robert Shull
With the Bush administration’s war on science raging all around us, it’s nice to be able to report a win for the public.
In January 2006, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a draft bulletin proposing to impose one-size-fits-all criteria for all agency risk assessments – and a good deal of other scientific and technical evaluations that aren’t considered risk assessments. OIRA’s bulletin was expected to be the swansong of then-OIRA administrator John Graham, who had long advocated manipulations and distortions of risk assessment in order to subvert federal capacity to protect the public.
OIRA submitted the proposed bulletin for peer review by the National Research Council, which has just delivered a stunning rebuke to Graham’s dream.
By David Michaels
In today’s Wall Street Journal (sub required), Jeffrey Ball reports that ExxonMobil has decided to stop funding several of the groups that have been in the forefront of attacking the scientific evidence on global warming.
The campaign to shame ExxonMobil appears to be working. Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a damning report describing how the oil giant funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science:
In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. As this report documents, the two disinformation campaigns are strikingly similar. ExxonMobil has drawn upon the tactics and even some of the organizations and actors involved in the callous disinformation campaign the tobacco industry waged for 40 years.
By Michael Silverstein
Thirty-five years after the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the promise of worker protection remains substantially unfulfilled. Over the past several months, I have been traveling across the country and talking with people experienced in worker health and safety to gather ideas about what we can do to protect workers better. The more I hear, the more I am certain that we can’t achieve this by simply trying harder to do more of the same.
The draft paper “Getting Home Safe and Sound? OSHA at Thirty-Five” summarizes what I’ve learned and suggests three main areas for change: stronger and more creative implementation of the OSHAct; statutory improvements to the OSHAct; and a variety of measures outside the OSHA framework. I hope that this paper will touch off productive discussion and catalyze action to improve worker health and safety. Before completing the paper, though, I’d like to open it up to online readers for comment.
We’re going to start sending out a weekly digest of blog posts via email. If you’d like to sign up, send an email to thepumphandle [at] gmail [dot] com with “subscribe” in the subject line.
by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
Mr. Milkey (for the State of Massachusetts): Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. It’s the troposphere.
Justice Scalia: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I’m not a scientist.
(Laughter)Justice Scalia: That’s why I don’t want to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth. [PDF of arguments here]
We all know that our children lack basic understanding of science and how it works. The dearth of math and science majors in our universities and the huge percentage of kids who know little or nothing about evolutionary theory are illustrative. But when our Supreme Court Justices expose similar ignorance about the uncertainties that are basic to all scientific inquiry, the situation is truly frightening. It’s not that all of us have to understand the differences between the troposphere and the stratosphere, as Justice Scalia plainly admits. But at least a basic understanding of the questions and issues that inform science would certainly be important in reaching judgments about critical issues that will affect the future of us all. No situation better exemplifies the potential catastrophes that may await us all due to this lack of understanding than the questioning by Justices Scalia, Alito and Roberts in the critical environmental suit Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency.
The blogosphere has been buzzing all week about Andrew Revkin’s New York Times piece on the new “middle stance” in the climate debate. Real Climate authors have one of the most comprehensive responses to it (as well as links to several other bloggers’ posts); Revkin himself responds in the extensive comment thread.
On other topics:
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by Liz Borkowski
Since November of 2006, all cigarette packages and advertising in Chile have been required to devote half of their space to hard-hitting anti-tobacco messages. In addition to a “These cigarettes are killing you” warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel García Martín, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to cancer after smoking for 20 years:
by Dick Clapp
The latest issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine contains a commentary from Ken Mundt, a consultant with ENVIRON International Corporation, on “Cancer incidence among semiconductor and electronic storage device workers,” an IBM-funded study by Bender et al appearing in the same issue. Mundt says that “the study offers some reassurance that at this stage of follow-up no noteworthy increases in cancer risk are seen among employees in the semiconductor production and storage device sectors” (though he notes that additional follow-up should be considered). I believe he is being too quick here to minimize the cancer risk in the semiconductor industry.
