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“On January 11, 2006, my husband and best friend, Clyde Jones, was taken from me and the children, family, friends and community… He went to work one morning for the City that he loved to a job that he loved. He never came home.”
These are the words of Casey Jones, yet another heart-broken wife left widowed by a preventable workplace disaster. Her nightmare began when her husband and two other men, working for the City of Daytona Beach at its waste management plant, were instructed to repair a damaged roof. Mrs. Jones nightmare continued when she learned her husband—a public sector employee–and his co-workers were not covered by OSHA standards.
Tammy has posted another edition of the Weekly Toll: Death in the American Workplace at her Weekly Toll blog. It gives short writeups on 57 workplace deaths, including the following:
* David Kessler, Jr., a 27-year-old communications worker from Marysville, Washington, died of severe shock after coming into contact with an electrical wire at the Wild Waves water park.
* Melinda Morrell, 23, was fatally shot while working at the Check N’ Go loan store in Waukegan, Illinois.
* Matthew Rouse, a 44-year-old construction worker from Jonesboro, Arkansas, died after falling from a forklift and then being crushed by the machine’s steel basket.
Read the full descriptions of these and other workplace deaths here. It’s an excellent reminder of how much work we still have to do on occupational health and safety.
President Bush has nominated Dr. James W. Holsinger, Jr. to be U.S. Surgeon General. Here’s the short item from the Associated Press:
President Bush has nominated a Kentucky cardiologist who is interested in fighting childhood obesity to be the next surgeon general, the White House announced. The nominee, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Kentucky, has led Kentucky’s health care system, taught at several medical schools and served more than three decades in the Army Reserve, retiring in 1993 as a major general.
Head over to Effect Measure for more details about Holsigner, such as his anti-gay religious views and the incompetence and negligence at the Department of Veterans Affairs when Holsinger was its Chief Medical Officer.
By David Michaels
Chris Cillizza of WashingtonPost.com’s The Fix blog reports that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is “growing more and more serious about a run for president” – in fact, he’s chosen a “campaign manager in waiting.”
Tom Collamore, a former vice president of public affairs at Altria, has been leading the behind-the scenes organization efforts for a Thompson presidential candidacy and will be intimately involved when (not if) the former senator decides to announce a bid.
Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris (PM), which was behind many of the tobacco industry’s creative methods for staving off and weakening government regulation of tobacco products. How much did Collamore participate in these activities?
Collamore joined Philip Morris in 1992, Cillizza reports. At that time, the tobacco industry was concerned about moves to ban smoking in public places based on the health risks associated with secondhand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). Tobacco’s number one enemy was the EPA, which had conducted a risk assessment that concluded that ETS was causing disease and death among non-smokers. Big Tobacco realized that as long as the harm from tobacco was limited to smokers, the cigarette makers could avoid regulation by claiming that smoking (and related illness) was just a personal choice issue. But once it became clear that smoking kills non-smokers too, all bets were off.
A 2004 article in Preventive Medicine by Monique Muggli, Richard Hurt, and Lee Becker uncovered Philip Morris’s work to “derail the [EPA’s] risk assessment on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) by recruiting a network of journalists to generate news articles supporting the industry’s position and pushing its public relations message regarding the ETS issue.” Collamore was apparently involved in this effort: Read the rest of this entry »
Manuel Roig-Franzia at the Washington Post reports that over the past six years, more than 30 journalists have been killed in Mexico, and countless more have been kidnapped. Grenades have been thrown into newspaper offices in Cancun, Hermosillo and Nuevo Laredo, and last week, a newspaper in Sonora announced that it was temporarily shutting down because of attacks and threats. The campaign of intimidation is attributed to the country’s drug cartels, and it has made Mexico the second deadliest country in the world for journalists after Iraq.
In other news:
The Bush administration isn’t the first to expand executive branch influence over the activities of federal regulatory agencies (like FDA, EPA, and OSHA), but it has taken the practice to a new level. Now that the Democrats are controlling Congress, though, moves by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would erect more hurdles to regulation are facing opposition from the legislative branch.
Back in January 2006, the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) issued a draft bulletin that laid out a new risk assessment protocol for federal agencies. The National Research Council reviewed the bulletin, found it to be fundamentally flawed, and recommended that it be withdrawn. The bulletin appeared to have died – until Susan Dudley, who received a recess appointment as OIRA head last month, suggested in an interview that she wants to move forward with it.
Senators Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut have written to OMB Director Robert Portman to request that OMB withdraw the proposed risk assessment bulletin. In their letter (PDF), they list some of the problems that the NRC identified (including a one-size-fits-all approach to a wide range of regulatory activities and a definition of “adverse effect” that may be too restrictive to prevent harmful exposures), and conclude:
By Liz Borkowski
While we’re waiting to hear what EPA and ConAgra have learned from studying emissions from microwave popcorn, it’s worth remembering that airborne artificial butter flavoring isn’t the only concern associated with this particular convenience food.
Rebecca Renner reported last year in Environmental Science & Technology about a study by FDA scientists on consumer products that contact food. They were investigating potential sources of the 4-5 ppb of PFOA, a suspected carcinogen, that most Americans carry in their blood, and one of the things they looked at was fluorotelomer coating on paper food packaging, which can degrade into PFOA. (To learn more about PFOA, see this case study at DefendingScience.org.) The packaging with the most fluorotelomer content was microwave popcorn bags.
What matters isn’t just how much PFOA is in consumer products, but how much of the chemical migrates from the product to the food cooked in it. Renner compares the scientists’ findings on microwave popcorn bags to findings on certain nonstick cookware that’s produced by a process that uses PFOA:
By David Michaels
“The cooperation of ConAgra Foods and the EPA has yielded a comprehensive understanding of butter flavor emissions for consumers.”
- Patricia Verduin, Senior Vice President Product Quality & Development, ConAgra Foods, Inc. in a November 29, 2004 letter to Paul Gilman, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Research and Development, U.S. EPA
As regular readers of this blog know, my colleagues and I at the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) have been pushing for regulation of occupational exposure to artificial butter flavoring, which has been linked to severe lung disease in workers from microwave popcorn plants (including the Orville Redenbacher plant in Marion, Ohio), flavor manufacturers, and other facilities. (See our case study on the topic for details.) We’ve also been trying to get an answer to the question that many people ask us when they learn about our work on this issue: are consumers who pop bags of microwave popcorn and inhale the buttery vapors also at risk?
The Spring/Summer 2003 issue of EPA’s Indoor Air Quality Research Update (PDF here; see page 5) announced the EPA was conducting a study to answer that very question – specifically, “to identify and quantify contaminants emitted while popping and opening a bag of microwave popcorn.” In July of 2006, after I inquired about the status of the study, the Chief of the EPA’s Indoor Environment Management Branch informed me that they anticipated sending a manuscript of the study to a peer-reviewed journal. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the study and related materials, and I recently received a packet of documents from EPA. It did not contain the results of the study – those, I’m told, will be published in a journal soon – but it did contain an interesting letter from ConAgra, the manufacturer of the Orville Redenbacher brand of microwave popcorn, to the EPA. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
We’ve been writing for the past few months about U.S. regulatory agencies’ failure to take meaningful action on diacetyl, a toxic component of artificial butter flavor, despite having been aware of its risks since at least the start of this decade. Now, mounting evidence suggests that some flavor manufacturers have known about diacetyl’s association with severe lung disease and failed to take appropriate action for even longer – since the early 1990s, when diacetyl started killing workers in flavor plants. Disabled workers are currently suing flavor manufacturers over their failure to alert purchasers of artificial butter flavoring to the substance’s dangers.
James McNair has an important article in the Cincinnati Enquirer on the diacetyl disaster at the flavorings plant in Carthage, OH, owned by the Swiss multinational company Givaudan. Three workers at the plant have died from bronchiolitis obliterans. Evidently, the director of environmental health and safety at the plant (formerly known as Tastemaker Corp.), who was hired after the first worker death, thought the plant couldn’t be operated safely. So he was fired: Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
The Chinese government has apparently recognized the importance of integrity in drug regulation. According to AP:
China’s top drug regulator was sentenced to death on charges of corruption and negligence, state media said Tuesday, the latest development stemming from growing alarm over the country’s poor food-safety record. Read the rest of this entry »
