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By David Michaels
All of a sudden, America has become acutely aware of the terrible lung disease caused by workplace exposure to artificial butter flavor. Last week, the failure of OSHA to do anything in response to the outbreak of cases across the country was the subject of several powerful newspaper articles (including a front page story and editorial in the New York Times) and hearings in the House and Senate. In addition, the obstructive lung disease cases in the flavor industry were discussed in an alarming article in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The article reported that
Bronchiolitis obliterans has been identified in microwave-popcorn workers in several states, including Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois; bronchiolitis obliterans in flavor-manufacturing workers has been identified in Ohio, California, Maryland, and New Jersey.
No doubt prompted by all the unwanted publicity, OSHA has announced a National Emphasis Program, finally promising to inspect microwave popcorn plants. To me, this is little more than a half-hearted attempt to make OSHA look busy, since NIOSH has been focused on the hazards in microwave popcorn production for the last six years. If OSHA really wanted to inspect factories with dangerous exposures and sick workers, they would start at the factories where flavors are manufactured and mixed, then visit the plants where diacetyl-containing snack foods like Twinkies are made.
A colleague who has been following the developments in the artificial butter flavor debacle sent me a note, underscoring just why OSHA’s emphasis program misses the boat: Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Following up on a powerful indictment of OSHA’s failure to protect workers from diacetyl and other hazards published two days ago in the New York Times, today’s edition of the newspaper has a scathing editorial on the demise of OSHA under the Bush Administration. The editorial writers particularly go after OSHA Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke, whom they refer to as “one of the most zealous of the antiregulatory ideologues.”
The problem goes beyond the actions (or inactions) of one anti-regulatory zealot – OSHA has been beaten down and handcuffed for so long, even well-meaning regulators would have trouble getting the agency to work well.
Celeste Monforton and I first identified the failure of OSHA to do anything about flavoring workers’ lung disease and FOIA’d the documents cited by the Times in 2004, long before Mr. Foulke came to OSHA. We first wrote about OSHA’s lack of response in an academic paper we published two years ago. Unfortunately, we entitled the paper “Scientific evidence in the regulatory system: Manufacturing uncertainty and the demise of the formal regulatory system,” (PDF here) and it was widely ignored until recently, perhaps because it had such a boring title. Since then, we’ve posted a tremendous amount of material up on SKAPP’s website, using diacetyl as a case study in regulatory failure.
Its very gratifying to see that a national discussion devoted to examining the crisis we identified and have been compiling information about.
Here’s the full text of the New York Times editorial:
Did you know that Wednesday was World Malaria Day? Farzaneh and Aman at Technology, Health & Development marked the occasion with posts about initiatives that are tackling the disease, while Merrill Goozner at GoozNews wonders why the World Banks seems to lack a sense of urgency on the issue.
Regular ScienceBlogs readers probably noticed that bloggers’ use of charts from scientific journals, and the larger issue of open scientific discourse, was a hot topic this week. It all started when Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle put up an informative post about a study recently published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture regarding alcohol’s effect on berries’ antioxidant activity. She included a chart and graph from the published results in her post, and soon received a threat of legal action from the journal’s publishers if she didn’t take them down. Bloggers were eloquent in their outrage; check the comments on this post for links to other bloggers’ reactions, or see the extensive list of links compiled by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock. Shelley soon received an email from the journal’s publisher apologizing for any misunderstanding, and stating that they would typically grant permissionon request and did not see a need to pursue the matter further.
Below the fold, there’s more on global health, environmental topics, and U.S. politics.
By David Michaels
On April 26, 2002, exactly five years ago today, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a report about the risk of a terrible and sometime fatal lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, in microwave popcorn workers. The report appeared in the CDC’s widely-disseminated Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Since then, dozens of workers at factories where artificial butter flavors are produced, mixed or applied have become sick, and at least three workers have died. Others are awaiting lung transplants.
By coincidence, today CDC has issued a new report in MMWR about bronchiolitis obliterans among workers in the flavoring industry.
In a year-long investigation that involved more than 100 Freedom of Information Act requests to EPA, the Center for Public Integrity discovered that Superfund site cleanups are being started and completed more slowly than in the past; that the reimbursements the Superfund program is getting back from companies for cleanups has steadily declined; and that a lack of funds has delayed needed work at some hazardous sites.
Superfund sites are areas that companies or government entities have moved away from, leaving hazardous materials behind. The Superfund program was initiated in 1980 to “locate, investigate, and clean up the worst sites nationwide.” U.S. residents should care about this program because, the Center’s analysis found, nearly half of the U.S. population lives within ten miles of one of the 1,304 active and proposed Superfund sites listed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
There are 114 sites whose neighbors might find this report particularly worrisome. The Center’s Alex Knott explains:
OSHA’s failure to keep up with today’s workplace hazards is the subject of two Congressional hearings and one New York Times article this week (see our post on the topic, too). Senator Kennedy is set to introduce new legislation, called the Protect America’s Workers Act, tomorrow; earlier this week, Senator Patty Murray held a hearing and introduced a bill on domestic violence in the workplace.
Also on the subject of workplace hazards and Capitol Hill, the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization has posted a short video featuring John Thayer, supervisor of the crew of workers who were exposed to asbestos for years while working in the tunnels under the U.S. Capitol. (Also see an earlier Washington Post article published after Thayer testified at a hearing in which Patty Murray introduced a bill to ban asbestos in the U.S.)
In other news:
By David Michaels
On the front page of today’s New York Times, reporter Stephen Labaton highlights a trend that we’ve been writing about here at The Pump Handle for some time: Occupational Safety and Health Administration has delayed or halted work on important standards for worker protection and put more of its energies into voluntary programs that let employers decide how far they’re willing to go to protect workers’ health and lives.
Labaton’s article focuses on OSHA’s failure to protect workers from diacetyl, an artificial butter flavoring that numerous scientific studies have linked to the lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. Much of the material he presented comes from the case study on flavor worker’s lung disease as an example of regulatory failure, posted at www.DefendingScience.org, the website of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP). Read the rest of this entry »
By Lee Friedman
The Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII), based on OSHA logs, indicates that occupational injuries and illnesses in the U.S. have steadily declined by 35.8% between 1992-2003. However, major changes to the OSHA recordkeeping standard occurred in 1995 and 2001. A recent study we published illustrates that the steep decline in reported occupational injuries and illnesses during the past 10 years in the U.S. workforce is an artifact resulting from changes to the recordkeeping rules and regulations
rather than an improvement in workplace safety. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
As regular readers of this blog know, worker health advocates have been pushing for regulation of diacetyl, an artificial butter flavoring chemical that’s been linked to bronchiolitis obliterans, a terrible, sometimes fatal lung disease.
Today, in anticipation of two Congressional hearings and a major newspaper article due out tomorrow, OSHA has announced that it will take its first steps to protect diacetyl-exposed workers. Unfortunately, OSHA has announced it will ignore thousands of workplaces where workers are being exposed with no protection, and will focus only on microwave popcorn factories, the one set of workplaces where NIOSH has already been helping employers address the problem. So when OSHA inspectors go out, they will likely find the problem under control in the popcorn factories. And more workers in the remainder of the food industry will get sick.
When you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and pay your fee to register your car, are you allowed to negotiate with the DMV as to how the agency will use your fee? Of course not. So why is the drug industry allowed to negotiate with the FDA about how the agency will use the money it collects in fees paid for new drug applications?
We’ve written several posts already about the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), through which the FDA collects money from drug makers in exchange for faster reviews of their new products. (Go here for a list of past PDUFA posts, or check out the new white paper on PDUFA here.) We and many other members of the medical and public health have raised concerns about impact of PDUFA on drug safety; Christopher Moraff summarized them neatly in a recent American Prospect article:
User fees are not uncommon in federal agencies, but critics of PDUFA say that what distinguishes it is an unprecedented level of collaboration between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry. Through protracted fee negotiations, the industry has a say in everything from how the money will be spent to setting up timetables for a drug’s approval — the equivalent, according to one former chief editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, of “putting the fox in the chicken coop.”
So, who does support the user fee system? None of the usual suspects, it turns out.
Read the rest of this entry »
