You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
Over at the Weekly Toll blog, Tammy says farewell to Carolyn Merritt, whose five-year term as chair of the Chemical Safety Board is coming to an end. She writes:
Carolyn is a strong, compassionate leader who has been in politics but hasn’t let it pilot her ethics. Carolyn has done a terrific job of letting the families be heard and putting the human factor back into the system. God knows I will miss her in her role and I pray she has the same success in her family life that she had during her duration at the CSB.
Also, don’t miss the most recent Weekly Toll – writeups of 109 deaths that occurred recently at U.S. workplaces. They include:
* Stephen Anderson a 60-year-old Utah Department of Corrections officer from Bluffdale, Utah, was shot while in a medical exam room with an inmate.
* Eduardo Jimenez, 23, was doing landscaping work along a highway in Edison, New Jersey when he was struck by wheels lost from a tractor-trailer.
* Christine Coleman was shot by her estranged husband in the parking lot of the Linwood, Pennsylvania furniture store where she worked.
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.
In a post last week entitled Mining Professors Oppose Mine Safety Bill, I invited the signatories of a letter opposing new mine safety legislation to disclose their financial ties to the mining industry (if any) or other related conflicts of interest. A couple of days later, one of the letter’s signers, Larry Grayson, PhD of Penn State University, responded thoughtfully and thoroughly (here and here) to my post. I respectfully invite the other signatories to follow Dr. Grayson’s lead and provide their own disclosures.
By Liz Borkowski
After former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that White House officials tried to weaken or suppress important health reports for political purposes, Washington Post reporters Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman followed up on the case of a 2006 surgeon general’s report on global health (draft here) whose publication was blocked.
Carmona’s report described the global nature of diseases and the many factors involved (including food and nutrition, water and air, and violence), and concluded with a call for international collaboration to improve overall global health. Who decided that this important public health message shouldn’t be shared with the public? Lee and Kaufman followed the trail to William R. Steiger, head of HHS’s Office of Global Health Affairs. Given Steiger’s record over the past few years, this latest revelation isn’t surprising.
(Since I’ve actually been away from the computer all week, these links are all to posts from the previous week. Feel free to add some of this week’s must-read blog posts in the comments.)
Several bloggers are keeping us up to speed on health policy and its implications. Rachel Gold and Elizabeth Nash at RH Reality Check take a midyear look at state reproductive health policies; Heather Won Tesoriero at WSJ’s Health Blog looks at state moves to ban mandatory overtime for nurses, which can help slow an exodus from the profession. Also at the Health Blog, Joseph Mantone notes that with Medicaid reimbursement rates low, Medicaid patients are having a hard time finding providers that will accept them. Mead Over at Global Health Policy highlights research exploring different factors in HIV transmission rates, which has implications for HIV prevention programs.
Elsewhere:
Does anyone need to worry about asbestos fibers released into the air following the explosion of an 83-year old Manhattan steam pipe last Wednesday? Hopefully not! So far, officials are saying that while asbestos fibers were detected in solid material near the site, they were not found in air samples collected on-site. Still, with the respiratory illnesses of WTC responders fresh in everyone’s mind, a Staten Island Advance columnist reported that Wednesday’s responders were quick to don masks and to start asking questions about potential health effects. Read more about the response to the incident from the L.A. Times and Newsday.com.
By David Michaels
We are pleased that the Washington Post has come to the same conclusion we have here at the Pump Handle (see here and here): something needs to be done to shake up the attorneys at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In an editorial today entitled FEMA’s Toxic Environment, the Post tells FEMA director R. David Paulison that “knocking a few heads in FEMA’s general counsel’s office would be a good first step” in sending a strong signal that the beleaguered agency needs to undergo major changes.
The environment at FEMA is certainly toxic to the Katrina victims, many of whom were moved into trailers where they were exposed to the toxic gas formaldehyde: Read the rest of this entry »
A group of 11 “academic experts in mine safety and health” sent a letter today to the leadership of the House Education and Labor Committee urging them to withdraw legislation (HR 2768 and HR 2769) on miners’ safety and health. The authors of the letter say that “now is not the right time to pursue” further improvements for miners.
Signers of the letters include several chairs of mining engineering departments, such as professor Larry Grayson, who offered just days ago a similar dire warning about more mine safety protections in an op-ed called Mine Mania (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7/22/07). He said:
many “good operators [have taken] voluntary steps to improve mine safety. …Once adopted, these voluntary measures undoubtedly will improve the safety of coal miners. …additional legislation now would not only intensify the chaos in the coal fields…”
Chaos in the coal fields? I’m not sure I’m ready to fall for this sky-is-falling prediction. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
In the continuing post-Hurricane Katrina debacle, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is facing two daunting tasks:
- Cleaning up some of the 56,000 trailers that are off-gassing formaldehyde, a toxic chemical; and
- Cleaning up the FEMA Office of General Counsel, which is evidently staffed with unethical attorneys. One recommended that the agency not test for formaldehyde because “Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.”
After a blistering hearing of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, and the release of a trove of embarrassing documents, FEMA has seen the error of its way and asked the CDC for help in testing the trailers for formaldehyde levels. Read the rest of this entry »
Crosspost from Effect Measure, by Revere
At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov. Our six medical colleague had been accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and sentenced to death. They have been imprisoned for 8 years, through two trials and numerous appeals. Genetic analysis of the infecting strains indicated the virus had been circulating there prior to the medics’ arrival in 1998, but was not allowed to be presented as evidence (more background in these posts).
By Myra L. Karstadt, Ph.D
On June 13, a team of which I was part received EPA’s highest award: The Administrator’s Gold Medal for Exceptional Service. According to the citation, the award was given to us “For successful conclusion of the largest administrative penalty action in history which will significantly improve reporting of TSCA toxic chemical risk information.”
The DuPont case, which I worked on from mid-2003 (the beginning of the investigation that resulted in the litigation) until I left EPA at the end of May 2005, was based in greatest part on the company’s violation of reporting regulations under section 8(e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). TSCA covers the production and distribution of commercial and industrial chemicals, and its goal is “to ensure that chemicals sold and used in the United States do not pose an unreasonable risk to human health and the environment.” Section 8(e) requires U.S. chemical manufacturers, importers, processors and distributors to notify EPA within 30 days of “new, unpublished information on their chemicals that may lead to a conclusion of substantial risk to human health or to the environment.” EPA determined that DuPont repeatedly failed to notify the agency about substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment that DuPont obtained about PFOA, a chemical involved in producing DuPont’s Teflon®, from as early as 1981 and as recently as 2004.
You’d think that a statutory section that resulted in “the largest administrative penalty action in history” would have a good deal of staff and resources devoted to it, and would be enforced with vigor with regard to violators other than DuPont. Sounds logical, but if that’s what you’re thinking, you would be wrong.
