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.
By David Michaels
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director R. David Paulison needs to pursue disciplinary charges against the attorneys who advised the agency to ignore its responsibility to take care of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Last week, we reported on the revelations that FEMA attorneys advised the agency not to test for the presence of formaldehyde in FEMA-provided trailers, fearing that the agency would be legally liable if any of the thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in the trailers became sick as a result of the toxic exposure. FEMA followed the advice: the agency stopped testing the trailers after some tests found high formaldehyde levels.
Missing from our discussion, as well as from most press coverage of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing where these revelations surfaced, was any discussion of the ethical responsibilities of these FEMA attorneys.
Bob Egelko reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that these attorneys may have crossed the line and committed ethical violations. Read the rest of this entry »
Congress has given significant attention over the last 18 months to the dangers facing US coal miners, but many fatal hazards claim the lives of other miners, such as those working at sand and gravel quarries, limestone and salt mines. This year, nearly twice as many miners have died at US metal and non-metal mining operations compared to coal mines. But, like most workplace fatalities, the deaths typically occur one miner at a time. These means the deaths rarely attract national attention.
On Thursday, July 19, Craig Bagley, 27 and Tyler Kahle, 19, were working in a lift basket about 50 feet off the ground, as part of an ironworking crew. The men, employees of a contractor (Alaska Mechanical, Inc.,) were working at the NovaGold Resources’ Rock Creek gold mine near Nome, Alaska. The lift basket became unstable and toppled to the ground, killing the two men.
Promoting public health depends on having good information. Much of the information we rely on comes from studies published in journals, but we often learn of these studies from news outlets that present distorted pictures of the findings. Going straight to the source limits that distortion but can be difficult for a number of reasons.
Several blog posts this week offer helpful guides to accessing, understanding, and contextualizing academic research for public health. I’m going to devote this week’s blog roundup to these posts (and to a few timely posts linking science and pop culture).
By Liz Borkowski
In the latest issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Joseph Plaster explores how the system for trucking imported goods from the Port of Oakland keeps both truckers and residents struggling. Truckers scrape by on meager earnings and can only afford the oldest, most polluting vehicles; pollution from hundreds of dirty trucks idling for hours each day spells health problems for truckers and those living nearby.
A coalition of labor, environmental, and community groups has proposed changes that would improve truckers’ situation and clear the air. The companies who contract out the driving jobs and the retailers whose products travel through the port would have to shoulder more of the costs, though, and will probably oppose the changes.
This week, OSHA posted on its website a case study designed to show the benefits of implementing a comprehensive workplace safety and health program. In announcing the case study, Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke, Jr said the report “is a good example of what can happen when management and employees dedicate themselves to workplace safety and health.” The news release’s quote from the company was equally positive “…safety is part of our culture, and we have had measurable results over the past 5 years.” But, the Foulke-promoted report has a familiar blame the worker tone, even suggesting in one part that an employee’s broken wrist was not really work-related.
By David Michaels
More sickening revelations about FEMA’s lack of concern for the health of Americans, this time concerning their actions months after Hurricane Katrina. Spencer S. Hsu of the Washington Post reports that
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said today.
At a hearing this morning of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night, the Barton Amendment to the Labor-HHS Appropriations Bill was defeated by a vote of 181-249. All the Democrats, along with 19 Republicans, voted against the amendment. If it had been enacted, it would have resulted in a cut of more than 20% of NIOSH’s budget, and would have killed the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) program.
Thanks for this victory goes to the labor movement, which mobilized quickly to oppose the amendment, and to Rep. David Obey and his Appropriations Committee staff.
According to an American Road and Transportation Builders Association analysis, roadway construction workers are killed at a rate nearly three times higher than other construction workers. Tom Demeropolis at the Cincinnati Post reports that roadway construction workers safety is on officials’ minds right now in Kentucky, where highway speed limits have just increased. In the Wall Street Journal, Al Karr notes that a trend toward doing more roadwork at night has eased daytime traffic snarls but heightened concerns about construction workers’ safety. Improved lighting, additional police enforcement, and enhanced communication with drivers are among the strategies some states are using to reduce the risk of accidents.
In other news:
Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 became a cause célèbre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the lives of over 50 of these children. Life in prison would seem an unhappy kind of victory in this case, but as with all things connected with it, it is not yet the last word. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
We’ve gotten news that Republicans in the House are planning to introduce a very destructive amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Bill, probably later today. This amendment will have a devastating impact on NIOSH’s research program, and it is important that we act to stop it.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) will offer an amendment to restrict NIH’s contribution to the Section 241a Public Health Service Act Evaluation Fund. This fund is the entire source of support for the NIOSH National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) program, a highly successful public-private research partnership that was initiated in 1996. All of the funds for NORA - $88,365,000 proposed for FY 2008 in this bill - come through section 241 set-aside funds.
Unfortunately, the Barton amendment is being pushed by cancer research groups who want to increase funding for cancer research, so this promises to be a difficult fight.
But this isn’t merely an attempt to get more money for cancer research. It is a cynical way to defund occupational health and safety research. When faced with the possibility of increased public health regulation, opponents of the regulation in question cry that more research is needed. That’s just what the Republicans on the House Education and Labor Committee did last month in their opposition to legislation compelling OSHA to issue a standard to protect food industry workers from the deadly artificial butter flavor chemical diacetyl. And they did it for years before that in fighting an ergonomics standard.
The best way to ensure that less research will be done is to cut off research funding. It guarantees greater scientific uncertainty, making needed public health protections more difficult to implement.
We stopped the Wicker Amendment. We can stop this one too.
Contact your Representative and tell her or him to oppose the Barton Amendment to the Labor-HHS Appropriations Bill.
Here’s some background on why the NIOSH NORA research program should not be defunded: Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Yesterday, we wrote about the efforts by Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS) to extend the prohibition on OSHA from fully enforcing its respiratory protection standard to protect health care workers and first responders from tuberculosis. Wicker successfully added this prohibition to legislation in the past, but the prohibition now in place ends in September, so he was trying again.
We’ve just learned that Rep. Wicker has backed down. In the face of well-organized opposition (unions and the public health community) armed with a very strong argument that the policy he was proposing was dangerous, Rep. Wicker has dropped his amendment. Read the rest of this entry »
You may already have read about a series of chemical explosions that occurred this morning at the Barton Solvents plant near Wichita, Kansas. An estimated 650,000 gallons of an “array of chemicals” were on fire, sending flames up to 150 feet high and a steady stream of thick black smoke into the air.
By David Michaels
How to not stop the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis? Give health care workers and first responders respirators that don’t fit correctly.
It is hard to believe, but the House of Representatives will very soon (perhaps later today) be voting on an amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Bill that would prohibit OSHA from fully enforcing its respiratory protection standard to protect health care workers and first responders from tuberculosis. It would exempt tuberculosis exposures from the requirement for an annual fit test to make sure the respirator fits and protects the worker from exposure.
Even stranger is the fact that OSHA is now prohibited from enforcing its respirator standard for these workers. But the prohibition ends with this fiscal year, at the end of September. This amendment, sponsored by Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS), is an attempt to extend this prohibition. Read the rest of this entry »
In Canada, asbestos is so sacred that the Canadian Cancer Society struggled with a decision about whether to call for a ban on a substance that’s internationally recognized as a carcinogen. Martin Mittelstaedt reports in the Globe and Mail:
By David Michaels
Gretchen Morgenson, the terrific New York Times reporter, has a disturbing piece that describes how the toothless Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has little ability to force hazardous consumer products of the shelves of toy stores.
The focus of her report is on super powerful miniature toy magnets. They are candy colored and easily eaten by small children. Morgenson’s article is a powerful case for new legislation that gives the CPSC some real power. It is also another piece of evidence documenting how law suits serve as the de facto regulatory system, since our public health agencies don’t have adequate tools to force better corporate behavior. Read the rest of this entry »
The Louisville-Courier Journal’s (LCJ) David Hawpe tells it like he sees it: “Coal is an outlaw industry.” When criticized for degrading the industry and asked when he would stop calling it names, Hawpe replied when the industry started “behaving like something other than a bunch of outlaws.” Read Hawpe’s editorial here.
…said Melissa Lee, widow of coal miner Jimmy Lee, 33 who died at a Harlan County, KY mine. At least 17 other families are probably feeling the same way about the improperly constructed seals at the Sago and Darby coal mines where their loved ones perished.
Bloggers have been focusing much of their attention on the federal government this week. The testimony of former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona about White House pressure to remain silent on stem cell research, sex education, and other topics spurred lots of reactions: Revere at Effect Measure and Cervantes at Stayin’ Alive criticized Carmona for failing to speak out during his four-year tenure, while Roy M Poses MD at Health Care Renewal, Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas, and Grrl Scientist at Living the Scientific Life direct their comments to at the Bush administration trend of covering up science for political ends.
In other federal government news, Matt Madia at OMB Watch urges us to tell our Senators to support the provision denying funding to the White House’s regulatory power grab. (If that sentence confused you, see this post for details.) David Roberts at Gristmill points out that Representative John Dingell may be calling our bluff with his carbon tax proposal, but he’s also giving environmentalists something we want. On the other hand, EPA’s draft list of endocrine-disrupting chemicals to be subject to a new screening protocol is a disappointment to Jody Roberts at The World’s Fair. The Corpus Callosum alerts us to the latest legislative attempt to align copayments for outpatient psychiatric services with those of other medical services, while Orac at Respectful Insolence offers some thoughts on improving NIH’s support of biomedical and behavioral research.
Elsewhere:
John F. Martonik, 58, former deputy director of OSHA’s Health Standards Program passed away on July 11 at his home in Annandale, Virginia. John retired from OSHA in 2002 and since then used his industrial hygiene expertise to assist workers in compensation and liability cases. He was especially expert in evaluating occupational exposures to benzene and petroleum distillates, and was deeply committed to seeking justice for workers and their surviving spouses.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has launched the website health08.org “to provide a central hub for resources and information about health policy issues in the 2008 election.” In a Boston Globe editorial, KFF president and CEO Drew Altman observes, “In a short period of time health has gone from an issue that was not even included on the list of seven issues voters were asked about on the national exit poll in last November’s election to the number one domestic issue and the number two issue overall behind Iraq on several recent polls.” Even so, he goes on to state, “There will no chance at legislation in the Congress in 2009 unless there is a big national debate about health reform in the presidential campaign.”
By Liz Borkowski
An article in the latest issue of OMB Watch’s Watcher newsletter reports on U.S. Chamber of Commerce efforts to get EPA to make changes to its chemical databases. The short story is that the Chamber asked the EPA to correct what it claimed was “inconsistent and erroneous” information about chemicals in the agency’s databases, and EPA rejected the claim, explaining that there were “valid and specific reasons” why databases might contain differing information for the same chemicals. (See the article for the complete story.)
The important thing about this story is that the Chamber made its request in the form of a Data Quality Act challenge. The DQA (officially the Information Quality Act, or IQA) has what sounds like a reasonable goal: “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” disseminated by federal agencies. Its history to date, however, shows it to be a tool for hindering agencies’ work to protect public health and the environment.
Federal officials have arrested three men in Las Vegas, saying they “enslaved more than 20 members of a Chinese acrobatic team, feeding them little, paying them next to nothing to perform, and confiscating their passports and visas,” the Associated Press reports.
In the Seattle Weekly, Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill tell the story of one of the 194 Thai workers who are suing a labor contractor and an orchard who brought the workers to the U.S. and employed them under a guest worker program. Thai farmer Wisit Kampilo mortgaged his father’s home to pay $11,000 to a recruiter who told him to expect 28 months of work at $8.50 per hour; he reports that he was then paid only $7 an hour and the work dried up after four months. Workers were allegedly housed in substandard conditions and had their movements strictly controlled by the contractors, who also confiscated workers’ passports.
In other news:
Dale Jones, 51 and Michael Wilt, 38 reported to work at the Caledonia Pit, a surface coal mine near Barton, Maryland at 5:30 am on Tuesday, April 17, 2007. In the 275 feet-deep pit, Jones operated the excavator while Wilt ran the dozer. By about 10:00 am that morning, something had gone terribly wrong. The massive highwall collapsed, burying the two coal miners under 93,000 tons of rock. John David Cook II, a co-worker and the shovel operator, dug night and day trying to reach Jones and Wilt. A state mining official who was on-site during the rescue-recovery operation said “the guys wouldn’t stop. They just wanted to get to those guys (Jones and Wilt). They’re a pretty close-knit bunch of guys.” Read the rest of this entry »
If you have a job, do you know who your employer is? The answer isn’t always straightforward, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández points out in a recent Boston College Third World Law Journal article, and the implications can be profound.
In “Feeble, Circular, and Unpredictable: OSHA’s Failure to Protect Temporary Workers,” García details the disadvantages temporary workers face. Temporary work is unstable, and few of the workers – who tend to be women, blacks, and Latinos – receive health insurance, paid vacation days, sick leave, or pension plans. The fact that many temporary workers are recruited and paid by temporary help firms, and then assigned to user firms, complicates the question of who’s actually employing them and is responsible for providing a hazard-free workplace. García explains:
A couple of weeks ago, EPA proposed a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone (0.07 – 0.075 ppb) that was lower than the current limit (0.08 ppb) but not as protective as the limit many experts suggested (0.06). The agency also announced that it would be taking comments on alternative standards from 0.06 – 0.08 ppb. (Read this post on the announcement for more.) On Wednesday at 10am, this proposed revision will be the subject of a hearing held by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee’s Clean Air & Nuclear Safety Subcommittee.
While we’re waiting to hear EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson give Senators more details about EPA’s ozone proposal, it’s worth checking out an editorial from a journal of the American Thoracic Society that gives the best one-page summary I’ve seen of the relevant science and the dangerous politics involved. (Via the American Lung Association’s Clean Air Standards page.)
Remember back in May, when public health advocates sounded the alarm about the fact that EPA’s short list of nominees for its Science Advisory Board asbestos panel included scientists associated with product defense firms? As David Michaels explained, these firms are hired by corporations and trade associations to minimize government regulation, and scientists associated with them have a fundamental conflict of interest that should preclude their participation in EPA’s science advisory panels.
Now a similar problem is arising with another SAB panel: the particulate matter review panel of SAB’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which will “review EPA’s technical and policy assessments that form the basis for updating the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for particulate matter.” The EPA has released the short list of nominees, and Merrill Goozner at GoozNews explains what’s wrong with it:
Cong. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) held a hearing on June 25 on the federal government’s response to the hazardous air contaminants that polluted lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. The featured witness was former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who was in the hot seat for her claims that the air in NYC was safe to breathe. Much less attention was paid to former OSHA assistant secretary John Henshaw, who sat next to Whitman, but was left largely unscathed by the questioning. At least one Henshaw exchange deserves attention. The former OSHA chief insisted there are “safe levels of exposure to asbestos.”
In honor of the 4th of July, Joseph Romm at Gristmill rounds up news of places that have cancelled fireworks displays due to drought, and Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science explains the chemistry behind firework colors.
As always, the U.S. Independence Day is an occasion for bringing up the “energy independence” idea; actions in this area often fall far short of the rhetoric, though, and this year was apparently no exception. Matt Madia at Reg Watch deems the House’s energy legislation a dud, and Angry Toxicologist reports that California’s governor is not so muscular when it comes to air quality regulations (follow-up here).
Four Nigerian states are suing British American Tobacco and Philip Morris to recover costs of treating smoking-related diseases. The plaintiffs charge that the companies aimed to recruit more smokers by targeting minors, using sponsorship of concerts and sporting events and free cigarette giveaways. Tosin Sulaiman in The Times (UK) reports:
After a contractor was rescued from a collapsed construction trench in Desert Hot Springs, California, Eric Solvig of The Desert Sun reported on how common it is for trench work in California to violate safety guidelines – and for workers to be killed or injured as a result:
State officials issued more than 1,400 citations from 2002 to 2006 for trenches that violated excavation safety guidelines, failed to have proper bracing and put workers in danger.
Nationwide, about 40 to 50 people die in construction trench collapses each year, said George Kennedy, vice president of safety for the National Utility Contractors Association.
California recorded six deaths in 2005 alone. … In many cases, experts say workers aren’t following safety guidelines.
California regulations require trenches to be shored when they are more than five feet deep and workers will be inside them. Initial findings from Cal/OSHA indicate that the Desert Hot Springs trench that collapsed was 20 feet deep and lacked shoring.
In other news:
By Liz Borkowski
Finally, here’s some good news in the power struggle between the Bush administration and Congress: The House has voted to prohibit the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from spending any money on an executive order that gives political appointees greater authority over federal regulatory agencies.
Bush’s executive order (which amended an order that was issued by Reagan and amended by Clinton) gives OIRA additional authority over activities of regulatory agencies; creates new requirements for the agencies, including an analysis of “market failures” that make rules necessary; and subjects more of their work to these requirements. Public health advocates have warned that this will delay the implementation of health, safety, and environmental protections – and some members of Congress agree.
Jim Abrams reports for the Associated Press on the House’s action:
At first, the FOIA request for workplace inspection data seemed straight forward. The requester asked for all records contained in OSHA’s database of industrial hygiene samples for the contaminant beryllium during the period 1979 to 2005. Previously, OSHA had provided on numerous ocassions comparable information to other requesters, and in some cases, even without requiring a formal FOIA request. Moreover, OSHA’s sister agency, MSHA, already provides full access to this kind of data right on its website.
But in this case, the requester was Adam M. Finkel, ScD CIH, a former OSHA regional administrator. He was not just any former employee. In 2003, Finkel won a whistleblower case against the agency after OSHA’s Assistant Secretary John Henshaw tried to fire him after complaining about the agency’s refusal to offer medical tests to inspectors who had been potentially exposed to beryllium while conducting inspections.
Now, after a two-year legal battle over Finkel’s FOIA request, a federal judge ruled that OSHA had not made case for withholding the data.
Michael Moore’s Sicko brought in $4.5 million in its opening weekend, and it seems like anyone who’s seen it has an opinion about the film and its subject. The WSJ health blog has compiled reviews from major newspapers; if you’re interested in blogger reactions, too, we have a few suggestions:
Read the rest of this entry »
When I heard Christie Whitman was going to testify before the House Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties subcommittee , I hoped that if she were pressured by the Bush administration to hide her concerns about the air quality at Ground Zero and in lower Manhattan, that today might actually be the day she’d “come clean” about it. I wasn’t expecting her to go so far as to say she was wrong, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, I thought, we could officially add this debacle to the growing list of ways in which the Bush administration has put politics before the public’s health.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Newmont Mining Company reports that the body of gold miner Dan Shaw, 30, was recovered on June 30 after an 11-day rescue effort. The federal agency responsible for miners’ safety and health, MSHA, has zero, zilch, nada on its website about the accident, the rescue or the recovery effort. In “Do I Expect Too Much from MSHA” I wrote (and commenters chimed in) why I don’t want to rely solely on information provided by the mining company. In this case though, updates from Newmont were the only way to monitor progress of the rescue. God rest the soul of Mr. Dan Shaw and send comfort to his family, friends and co-workers who kept vigil for all those many days. Read the rest of this entry »
