You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2007.
Climate change is a big issue in DC these days, and the folks at Gristmill are following the drama. David Roberts updates us on some of the recent developments in Congress, Kate Sheppard tracks efforts to eliminate tax breaks for Hummer purchases, and Van Jones applauds the House Education and Labor Committee’s passage of the “Green Jobs Act of 2007.” They’re also looking at strategies: Sean Casten advises reframing investment in renewables as leveling the playing field, and David Roberts wonders whether it’s wise to demonize House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell.
Over at Shifting Baselines, Jack Stern lets us know about ocean-related legislation Congress is set to take up.
Elsewhere, there’s plenty of non-DC-centric blogging:
MSHA’s Assistant Secretary announced that he is creating an Office of Accountability to provide
“enhanced oversight, at the highest level in the agency, to ensure that we are doing our utmost to enforce safety and health laws in our nation’s mines.”
The announcement came with the release of three internal investigation reports which Asst. Sec. Stickler said
“identified a number of deficiencies in our enforcement programs, which I found deeply disturbing.”
My colleague Celeste Monforton has just posted a new case study at DefendingScience.org, and it’s worth a read for anyone interested in industry attempts to bury information about products’ potential harmful effects.
The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) is a private, not-for-profit, professional organization for practitioners in the field of workplace and environmental health and safety. Since 1946, ACGIH committees have studied substances to which workers are exposed and recommended Threshold Limit Values (TLVs), which are akin to exposure limits.
The reason ACGIH has come under fire is basically that it has filled a void left by OSHA inactivity – and some industries would rather see that void be left empty.
As Dick Clapp wrote earlier this month, Rachel Carson’s critics have used the 100th anniversary of her birth as an occasion to attack the influential environmental author. In the New York Times, columnist John Tierney (sub only) called Carson’s classic work Silent Spring “a hodgepodge of science and junk science.” Barry Commoner, himself an author of landmark books on ecology, wrote a response to the Times, and has given us permission to post it here. -Liz Borkowski
To the Editor:
John Tierney’s rehash (Science Times, June 5, 2007) of the long discredited arguments against the 1972 law banning the use of DDT in the U.S. is a malicious attack on Rachel Carson’s classic work, “Silent Spring,” where she concluded that cancer incidence is largely due to synthetic organic chemicals rather than to naturally occurring ones. Tierney’s evidence that natural compounds are “as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones” is directly contradicted by a comprehensive review of data from five international cancer agencies recently reported in the American Cancer Society’s journal CANCER. By checking this study’s list of chemicals that cause breast cancer in laboratory animals against the Combined Chemical Dictionary (a database distinguishing synthetic and natural organic chemicals), I find that of the total 212 organic chemicals, 203 are synthetic and only 9 are produced by living things. In calling “Silent Spring” a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,” Mr. Tierney has produced a shameful display of junk journalism.
Barry Commoner, Senior Scientist
CBNS, Queens College, CUNY
In the Chinese provinces of Henan and Shanxi, police have raided 7,500 brick kilns and rescued hundreds of slave laborers, many of them children. Victims were kidnapped or entrapped with offers of work and then sold into slavery; officials report arresting 250 people for the crimes. Jane Macartney of The Times describes the horrific conditions at the kilns:
The children, some as young as 8, worked in brick kilns for 16 hours a day with meagre food rations. They were guarded by fierce dogs and thugs who beat their prisoners at will. [...]
They lived in squalid conditions with many adult workers, sleeping on filthy quilts on layers of bricks inside the brickworks, with the doors sealed from the outside with padlocks and the windows barred with pieces of wood.
Many children had festering wounds on their black feet and around their waists, apparently from burns. Some were even beaten to death by their guards.
Local officials apparently ignored pleas and protests from family members of missing children, and the raids only occurred after 400 parents posted a letter on the internet.
Others recent news highlights risky working conditions in several specific industries:
By Peter Lurie, MD, MPH, Deputy Director, Public Citizen’s Health Research Group
Dr. Lurie is a contributor to Public Citizen’s drug newsletter, available at www.worstpills.org. He will present testimony on state doctor gift disclosure laws before the Senate Special Committee on Aging on Wednesday, June 27, 2007. This article originally appeared in the May 2007 issue of Public Citizen’s Health Letter.
The life of a doctor must be tough. To judge by most of their offices, doctors are unable to afford pens, mugs, refrigerator magnets, or pads of paper. Even lunch is beyond their reach, it seems. And dinner at a fancy downtown restaurant? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Fortunately, there’s a group willing to step into the breach and supply these missing morsels and amenities. You guessed it: the pharmaceutical industry.
Despite the growing prevalence of direct-to-consumer advertising on television ($4.2 billion in 2005), the pharmaceutical industry continues to lavish the lion’s share of its advertising budget on physicians ($7.2 billion, excluding the ubiquitous free samples). After all, it is the physician who wields the power of the prescription pen.
Somehow, doctors operate under the delusion that the pharmaceutical industry is misguided enough to squander close to $20 billion on promotion annually even though, according to many doctors’ reasoning, all this largesse has no influence upon their prescribing habits. Much research suggests otherwise. When doctors were sent on expensive junkets to exotic locales, purportedly to receive objective education on a drug or disease, researchers noticed that prescribing of the sponsoring drug companies’ products went up in those doctors’ hospitals upon their return. Doctors accepting gifts from drug companies are more likely to request that their hospital add drugs to the hospital’s formulary, its list of preferred drugs.
Some people have had enough. Recently, a number of prominent medical schools, including Stanford, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, have sharply limited interactions between their physicians and pharmaceutical representatives. And now states are getting in on the action.
By Liz Borkowski
When EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson announced last week that the agency would lower the limit for ground-level ozone pollution, he acknowledged that the current standard of 0.08 parts per million was insufficiently protective of public health. This was an appropriate rationale for changing the limit, since the EPA is required to establish air quality standards exclusively on the basis of health consideration. The proposal of 0.07 – 0.075 ppm isn’t as low as the 0.06 – 0.07 ppm that the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee recommended (PDF), but at least it’s an improvement.
On the other hand, the EPA press release states that “EPA also is taking comments on alternative standards within a range from 0.060 ppm up to the level of the current 8-hour ozone standard, which is 0.08 ppm.” (Comments will be accepted for 90 days.) The Washington Post reports on the reasoning:
Last Wednesday, June 20, I learned from a newspaper reporter that a gold miner was missing at the Newmont company’s Midas mine near Winnemucca, Nevada. I checked MSHA’s website, but nothing was posted about the accident. No problem, I’ll cut them some slack. Maybe within 24 hours they’d provide some details. Read the rest of this entry »
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) will chair a hearing today (June 25) on the federal government’s failure to protect workers’ and residents’ health from the toxic dust cloud created in NYC after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The premiere witness will be Christine Todd Whitman, who was EPA administrator at the time of the attacks and reported that the air was safe to breathe. Former OSHA Asst. Secretary John Henshaw will also testify, and hopefully will be questioned pointedly by subcommittee members on why the Administration decided to forego enforcing critically important worker protection standards, such as respiratory protection. Read the rest of this entry »
Louisville-Courier Journal reporters Laura Unger and Ralph Dunlop offer us the voices and faces of miners who are suffering from coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. Their special report, Black Lung: Dust Hasn’t Settled on Deadly Disease, includes an on-line version which features five compelling videos featuring 40- and 50-year old coal miners who are now suffering with the disabling lung disease. Mr. Danny Hall, 56, for example, who is still severely impaired despite receiving a lung transplant says “if I had to do over, I wouldn’t ever go into coal mining.”
