You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2007.
by Celeste Monforton
Yesterday in “MSHA Spokesman Parrots Bob Murray,” I wrote about MSHA’s rejection of a request by the families of the six trapped Crandall Canyon miners to have the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) serve as the miners’ representative during MSHA’s investigation of the disaster. As usual for me, about two hours after hitting the “print post” button, I realized I should have said this and I should have said that. Oh the glories of blogging! Here’s what came to me after hitting the “print post” button:
I was irked by MSHA’s spokesman Dirk Fillpot saying the agency had spent ‘untold hours’ briefing the families of the missing miners. Your point is?
Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me that today is the third annual Blog Day, which “was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest.” To participate, bloggers link to five new blogs – and I’m going to interpret “new” as meaning “a blog I discovered fairly recently and suspect most readers don’t know about yet.” So, here are my five blog links for Blog Day 2007:
- The Nata village blog provides an up-close view of the battle to control the spread of HIV/AIDS in one village in Botswana.
- Epidemix covers “trends, technologies and other contagions in medicine and health” (via Technology, Health & Development).
- The Neighborhood Toxicologist reports on chemical contaminants that affect our daily lives.
- FarmPolicy.com gathers all the U.S. farm policy info in one place (via Gristmill, which will tell you why you should care about farm policy).
- Peter Suber, Open Access News champions the movement to make peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature freely available (via Coturnix, who is collecting blogospheric reactions to the PR offensive some major publishers are mounting against open access).
Use the Technorati tag BlogDay2007 to identify a Blog Day post or find others. Happy Blog Day!
In recognition of the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection provide a series of posts about the lessons from this disaster. At Gristmill, Joseph Romm explains why Hurricane Katrina busts the myth that humans can adapt to climate change.
Elsewhere:
by Susan F. Wood, PhD
Today’s Washington Post writes about one more instance where women’s health and children’s health were a lower priority than the interests of a powerful group. In this case, it was breastfeeding vs. the formula industry.
Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee write:
In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter, the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were “grateful” for his staff’s intervention to stop health officials from “scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding,” and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.
by Celeste Monforton
Max Follmer of The Huffington Post reports that MSHA has rebuffed a request from the Crandall Canyon families to designate the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to serve as their representative during MSHA’s formal accident investigation.
“In a statement e-mailed to The Huffington Post, MSHA spokesman Dirk Fillpot defended the agency’s actions, saying federal officials have spent ‘untold hours’ briefing the families of the missing miners. We are disappointed that the UMWA is trying to use a law enforcement investigation for its own purposes.”
Hmmm. Where have I heard this before?
Early on in the disaster, when the TV cameras couldn’t get enough of the Crandall Canyon operator, Mr. Bob Murray lambasted the miners’ union, along with Davitt McAteer and Tony Oppegard, and accussed them of trying to organize workers at the mine. (here) Now, MSHA’s spokesman Dirk Fillpot is using Murray’s script?? Could things get any worse for miners’ safety in this country?
By Liz Borkowski
Here in the U.S., people seem to like the idea of our government ensuring that we’ve got clean air, clean water, and healthy workplaces, and that our exposure to toxic substances is limited. However, we also keep electing politicians who make it hard for federal agencies to ensure these things.
We’ve written before about problems at OSHA, where workers suffer from preventable harm while officials emphasize voluntary compliance at the expense of standard-setting, and at FDA, where a rush to review new drug applications leaves post-market drug safety under-resourced. While presidential appointees heading these agencies deserve a share of the blame (a hefty share, in the case of OSHA’s Edwin Foulke), the legislation governing agency activities often erects hurdles that can slow progress to a crawl. A new report from Environmental Defense shows how this is happening at EPA with toxic chemical legislation.
By David Michaels
The media has been buzzing (see here and here and here) about the announcement by the Pop Weaver Company that they will soon be marketing a butter flavored microwave popcorn that doesn’t use diacetyl in the butter flavor. As readers of this blog know, diacetyl (a component of artificial butter flavor) has been implicated in dozens of cases of terrible lung disease in workers who manufacture, mix and apply flavorings. (We’d like to know if the chemicals that have replaced diacetyl are safe – but that will be the subject of a later post).
We still don’t know if exposure to diacetyl at home is dangerous. A year ago, we asked the EPA to release the results of a study of the airborne materials that are released when bags of microwaved popcorn are opened, but the agency has refused, although the agency acknowledged it has given the results to the popcorn industry. Now, it appears that the still secret findings helped convince Pop Weaver to drop diacetyl.
The Mountain Eagle’s Tom Bethell recounts a 1986 coal mining disaster in Queensland, Australia which involved an explosion in an abandoned, sealed area which caused the death of 12 miners. Its similarities to the 2006 Sago tragedy end there because, as Bethell writes:
In the wake of that disaster, the Australian government launched an innovative program to spur development of through-the-earth communication and tracking technology. Australian coal producers agreed to assess themselves a per-ton fee, with the revenues used by the government to support companies—mostly small entrepreneurial start-ups—whose concepts showed promise.
In his editorial “An Unnatural Disaster” he offers his experienced assessment of what’s wrong with our nation’s mine safety enforcement system and the coal industry.
More distressing news related to Ground Zero keeps coming out. A probe has been launched into the Deutsche Bank building fire that killed two firefighters on August 18th; community leaders are criticizing the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for hiring a demolition subcontractor with insufficient experience and numerous city and federal violations listed against it. The building pipe that was supposed to supply the firefighter with water had been turned off.
Also, findings released by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene show that Ground Zero rescue and recovery workers have developed asthma at a rate that is 12 times what would be expected for adults.
Elsewhere:
During one of Mr. Bob Murray’s endless television appearances, he was asked why his underground coal mine in Illinois had received more than 900 safety and health violations last year. In his “I’m just a humble coal miner” kind-of-way, he tried to explain that the public just doesn’t understand that getting written up by a mine inspector is commonplace, and most of those 900 violations were for trivial items like not having toilet paper in the restrooms.
Oh really? I reviewed all 975 violations cited in 2006 at Murray Energy’s coal mine in Galatia, Illinois, and only 3 of the 975 had anything to do with toilets or toilet paper. Instead, I identified more than 190 violations for having an accumulation of combustible material (i.e., piles of coal and coal dust), nearly 70 for electrical-system problems, and more than 50 for inadequate roof or rib control (i.e., to prevent cave-ins).
