You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2008.
The breakneck pace of high-rise construction on Las Vegas’ famed Strip comes at a terrible price: Since the end of 2006, nine construction workers have died in workplace accidents. In a special two-part series, the Las Vegas Sun’s Alexandra Berzon explores why these deaths are happening and what the state OSHA’s response has been.
Berzon’s first article, “Pace is the new peril,” begins with the story of 46-year-old Harold Billingsley, who worked on the CityCenter development, a casino and six adjacent high-rises that together amount to the most expensive private commercial development in this country’s history:
By Vera Toulokhonova
Over spring break, my family and I traveled to spend a weekend in New York City. One of our expeditions included a visit to the Statue of Liberty and, naturally, to the large restroom located on Ellis Island. The first thing I noticed about this notably modern facility is the proliferation of green signs all over its walls. Each had a large, bold, green heading, which read “Green Restroom.” I was curious to see exactly what constitutes a restroom that prides itself on being “Green.”
In response to a recommendation from the Department of Labor’s Inspector General, MSHA released data on 40 additional deaths which occurred (mostly) in 2007 at U.S. mining operations but were deemed not “chargeable” to the mining industry. The information, which includes 5 deaths in late 2006 and 35 in 2007, involved miners, contract workers, a mine owner, children of mine operators, and trespassers onto mine property. Of the 40 deaths, 30 were classified as “natural causes,” based on autopsy reports with notations such as “acute cardiac dysrhthmia,” “acute myocardial infarction,” “atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” “pulmonary thromboembolism,” “ischemic heart disease.” The remaining 10 deaths included two suicides and eight fatal injuries involving individuals not authorized to be on the mine property such as former employees and apparent burglers.
Bloggers had a lot to say about food this week:
Tom Philpott at Gristmill contrasts the U.S. and Canadian approaches to regulating the use of ethanol distillers grains in cattle feed. Guess which country’s regulators think the important thing is leaving cattle owners free to feed their animals whatever they please, even if the substance in question has been linked to beef being tainted with a deadly strain of E. coli?
Elanor at The Ethicurian (via Enviroblog) warns that EPA wants to deny communities information about the toxic gases coming out of confined animal feeding operations.
Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth brings us the latest news about the effects of global warming and overfishing on salmon and other marine fish populations.
Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair recaps recent articles about local food and energy efficiency, and shares an interesting finding from research on the energy use of a Charlottesville farmers’ market.
Elsewhere:
The Senate HELP Committee’s Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety announced that former OSHA Assistant Secretary, Mr. Gerard Scannell, will testify at next week’s hearing on workplace safety. He was the OSHA chief during the George H.W. Bush administration, and a long-time officer with the National Safety Council.
The hearing (previous post here) about serious and repeat violators of worker safety protections will also feature testimony by Mr. Eric Frumin, Director of OHS for Unite!Here, who will likely discuss corporate bad actors, link Cintas (post here). I’m so pleased to read that Senator Murray’s staff invited Mr. Scannell to testify, and that he agreed to do so.
Workers repairing the Qarmat Ali water injection plant in Iraq were told that the orange substance strewn around the facility was only a mild irritant – but after two-and-a-half months of exposure to it, many workers felt ill. Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe:
But the chemical turned out to be sodium dichromate, a substance so dangerous that even limited exposure greatly increases the risk of cancer. Soon, many of the 22 Americans and 100-plus Iraqis began to complain of nosebleeds, ulcers, and shortness of breath. Within weeks, nearly 60 percent exhibited symptoms of exposure, according to the minutes of a meeting of project managers from KBR, the Houston-based construction company in charge of the repairs.
Now, nine Americans are accusing KBR, then a subsidiary of the oil conglomerate Halliburton, of knowingly exposing them to the deadly substance and failing to provide them with the protective equipment needed to keep them safe.
KBR claims it should be protected from employee lawsuits under the Defense Base Act. Since KBR hired the workers through two subsidiaries, though – a move that let them avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll taxes – they may not qualify as an employer, and may be ineligible for that protection.
In other news:
The Palm Beach (Florida) Post is reporting that Ag-Mart has settled a civil suit filed by a migrant farmworker family who alleged their son’s serious birth defects were associated with the company’s improper handling of pesticides. Earlier reporting in March 2005 by the PB Post exposed the working and living conditions of this family and other farmworkers, and birth defects among some of their children.
At the same time this settlement was reported, another Florida newspaper wrote that violations against Ag-Mart for failure to comply with the State’s pesticide use rules had nearly all been dropped by an administrative law judge. Oddly, these violations (e.g., failing to provide protective equipment for employees working with pesticides, allowing workers to harvest crops too soon after chemicals were sprayed, burning pesticide containers) all seem like the type of practices that might have contributed to the workers’ exposure and possible link with the infants’ malformations. This development, coupled with the fact that the Ag-Mart case settlement is protected by a confidentiality agreement, creates serious obstacles for public health prevention.
I recently started a new job, and since I don’t know the surrounding neighborhood well yet, I’ve been taking different routes through it every morning on my way to the office. Yesterday, steps from the White House, I approached a small construction site, shuffling to escape the unmistakable roar of a jackhammer on concrete. But then something stopped me in my tracks. The morning sunlight shining brightly down on the workers revealed the swirling clouds of dust emanating from the trembling sidewalk.
Rachel Nugent at Global Health Policy reminds us that it’s World TB Day. She’s got good news and bad news about tuberculosis around the globe. On the plus side, tuberculosis control funding has reached an all-time high, and the number of TB cases per capita has dropped. On the minus side, the number of cases is increasing, and more and more of these cases are turning out to be resistant to many of the drugs generally used to fight them.
In today’s New York Times, Celia W. Dugger looks at the lives of South Africans with MDR and XDR TB (MDR is multi-drug-resistant, XDR extensively drug-resistant). Many of them are held in a hospital that’s essentially “a prison for the sick”:
The Senate HELP Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, chaired by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), will hold a hearing on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 entitled “Serious OSHA Violations: Strategies for Breaking Dangerous Patterns.” The subcomittee has not yet released a witness list, but I’d expect to hear something about some of the bad actors profiled in the “Dirty Dozen” report, prepared in 2006 by the National COSH.
With the six-month deadline approaching for issuing citations and monetary penalties, OSHA announced today 13 willful and 25 serious violations against RPI Coatings, the employer of five workers who died in early October at the Excel Energy Cabin Creek Station hydroelectric plant near Georgetown, Colorado. The penalty amount proposed by OSHA against RPI Coatings is $845,100.
The deceased workers were part of a contract maintenance crew who were applying a specialized epoxy coating onto the inside of a 3,000 foot-long (and 4 foot-wide) pipe. A fire erupted inside the pipe, starving the atmosphere of oxygen. The five men were Anthony Aguirre, 18, Donald Dejaynes, 43, Gary Foster, 48, Dupree Holt, 37 and James St. Peters, 52 (previous post here).
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Williamson links the housing-market crisis to recent problems with food, drug, and toy safety and suggests that the combination of these problems spells more regulation on the horizon:
By Adam Finkel
I am always on the lookout for examples of how laypeople and/or experts fail to appreciate the enormity of the risks workers face. As someone who came to OSHA from a background in environmental health policy, where an excess lifetime fatality risk greater than one chance per million is often seen as unacceptably high, I am still amazed at the unfinished business on the occupational agenda. I sent the letter below to the New York Times on March 14th, and it was not printed amid a group of other letters focusing on more lurid aspects of Eliot Spitzer’s downfall. I appreciate columnist Nicholas Kristof calling attention to the hazards of “the oldest profession” (well, except for agriculture, perhaps), but I wish more people understood that as intolerable as a 1% lifetime risk is, it is by no means confined to one particular occupation.
This week, bloggers look at who’s making decisions about coal:
- At Gristmill (home of David “coal is the enemy of the human race” Roberts), Ted Nace explains how a bureaucrat’s change of one number in a spreadsheet can lead to 132 fewer new coal plants being built, but Tom Philpott warns that Appalachian coal will be mined anyway – and shipped to China.
- Keith Johnson at Environmental Capital explains how Kansas has become Big Coal’s new battlefield, and the role of state courts and officials in determining who wins.
- At Appalachian Voices, jdub reacts to Hillary Clinton’s remarks about mountaintop removal mining, and collects other online responses.
Elsewhere:
A coal miner from eastern Kentucky filed a law suit yesterday requesting a federal court judge to compel MSHA to issue a health standard to prevent miners from developing black lung disease. The Petition for Writ of Mandamus (Howard v. Chao) argues that Congress intended, through the Federal Coal Mine Health & Safety Act of 1969 (amended 1977), MSHA to promulgate regulations to prevent new cases of coal workers pnuemoconiosis, progressive massive fibrosis and other illnesses related to miners’ exposure to respirable coal mine dust. Despite evidence over the last 12 years that the current permissible exposure limit is inadequate to prevent black lung disease, including a NIOSH criteria document which recommended a 1.0 mg/m3 limit, the petitioner argues that MSHA has failed to fulfill its duties under the Mine Act. The Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center filed the petition on behalf of Mr. Scott Howard*—one heck of a brave man for putting his name (not John Doe) on this case. He is a coal miner (has been since 1979) and is directly affected on every shift by an inadequate coal mine dust standard.
It’s national Sunshine Week—an effort “to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.” A great way to celebrate the public’s right-to-know what its government is doing, is by sending a FOIA request to your favorite local, state or federal agency. In that spirit, I faxed a FOIA request to OSHA today.
My request stems from an exchange of comments on work-related motor vehicle fatalities following my March 7 post “When the Road is Your Workplace”. I learned that the Rhode Island Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (RICOSH) had actually petitioned OSHA in 2002 for a motor vehicle and traffic safety rule. It made me wonder, how many other worker-safety advocates have petitioned OSHA in recent years to address occupational hazards?
Back in December, Andrew Schneider reported in the Seattle PI that the use of diacetyl-containing cooking oils could be putting professional cooks at risk for the same severe lung disease that’s struck workers in microwave-popcorn and flavor factories. After his article came out, the Unite-Here union requested an investigation from NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), and the union’s local Seattle chapter requested one from Washington state’s Safety and Health Assessment and Research for Prevention.
Schneider now reports that both of these investigations are underway – and he also highlights two new animal studies by federal scientists documenting that low-level exposure to diacetyl can cause damage. (These are in addition to the many existing studies about the harmful effects of the butter-flavoring chemical.)
In a welcome contrast to the disappointing ozone rule the agency announced last week, EPA has issued tougher air-pollution standards for diesel locomotives and marine engines. When fully implemented in 2030, the new standards will reduce particulate matter pollution by 90% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%. The new standards only cover ships traveling on inland waterways and between U.S. ports – which means that LA and Long Beach residents will still be breathing lots of pollution from international cargo ships – but EPA estimates that its benefits will still be substantial:
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard District of Columbia v. Heller, which pits DC’s handgun ban against the Second Amendment. DC’s gun law is the strictest in the nation, since it effectively all handguns; it does, however, allow for rifles and shotguns if they’re kept disassembled or under trigger lock. The big issue is whether the Second Amendment – “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – guarantees an individual right to gun ownership, or only a collective right that hinges on militia service.
For the public health community, the question isn’t what the framers intended, but what works.
On OSHA’s latest regulatory agenda, the agency noted it would complete the required SBREFA report for a draft rule on beryllium in January 2008, and it did (121-page PDF here) This report stems from the December 6 meeting between OSHA, the Small Business Administration and small entity representatives, as required by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act . This 1996 law requires OSHA (and EPA) to share a draft of proposed regulations to a group of small business owners (i.e., companies with 500 or fewer employees) so they can suggest changes to it or to the agency’s preliminary economic analysis. The comments, recommendations and resulting changes to the pre-proposed rule are documented in a SBREFA report.
I highlight below some of the items I found most interesting in the report.
On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the toll on members of the military is substantial: at least 3,988 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq and 29,395 more have been wounded. iCasulties.org estimates the total number of Coalition force fatalities at 4,298 and Iraqi Security Force fatalities at 6,727.
What these numbers don’t reveal is the toll on wounded soldiers, their families, and their communities. Veterans suffering from debilitating injuries and mental health problems often have to fight to get the care they need from a system ill-prepared to provide it; meanwhile, mental and physical hardships contribute to economic problems and even homelessness, making the return to health even more difficult. In some horrifying cases, PTSD-suffering veterans turn their guns on family or community members. Here are a few of the articles from the past few months about war’s toll on veterans and those around them:
New York Times: The Plight of American Veterans
The American Prospect: What Happened to Mental Health Care for Vets?
NPR: Private Attorneys Fight for Disabled Veterans
New York Times: When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly
Washington Post: Soldier Suicides at Record Level
AP: Pentagon Reports Increase in Harassment
AP: New Generation of Homeless Vets Emerge
USA Today: Army Task Force Finds Gaps in Brain-Injury Care
NYT: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles
McClatchy: Payments Vary Greatly for New Veterans with Mental Illness
NPR: Army Dismissals for Mental Health, Misconduct Rise
AP: Wounded Vets Also Suffer Financial Woes
In other occupational health and safety news:
Despite the excellent presentations by USMWF’s Tammy Miser, the Chemical Safety Board’s William Wright and NFPA’s Amy Spencer, the image that remains in my head from last week’s congressional hearing on combustible dust was Ranking Member Howard “Buck” McKeon’s performance. After the aforementioned witnesses made common-sense appeals in support of an OSHA standard modeled on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards, Congressman McKeon (R-CA) made unconvincing claims that such rules are so very complicated. Surely, no simple small businessman could ever be expected to comply with them.
I say: “Phooey!”
Just a heads-up for our DC readers: the Environmental Film Festival is going on right now. On Saturday, the last day of the festival, there’s a special World Water Day tribute at the Carnegie Institution (1530 P St. NW, DuPont Circle Metro) featuring the following:
Welcome by Peter O’Brien, Managing Director, Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital. Opening remarks by Guest Curator Linda Lilienfeld, followed by: AGUAS CON EL AGUA; UMBRELLA; WATER FIRST; TIROL - LAND OF WATER; THE STAVE WEIR IN LUCERNE; RIVERGLASS; VILLAGE OF DUST, CITY OF WATER; and SWITCH-OFF. The World Water Day Tribute will continue with a panel discussion entitled “Global Water Challenges,” and the film finale FLOW: FOR THE LOVE OF WATER.
There’s plenty of worrying environmental news out there, but over the weekend bloggers and reporters highlighted a few glimmers of hope, too:
Yesterday we learned that former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) passed away at age 90. His former colleague, Sentor Edward Kennedy issued a statement, saying:
“He was the conscience of the Senate, who never shied away from the difficult fights, and never apologized for standing up for workers.”
I had the unforgettable opportunity to watch Senator Metzenbaum in action at numerous congressional hearings on worker safety and health topics. Whether the topic was right-to-know, protections for hazardous waste clean-up workers or inadequate OSHA penalties, he was always well-prepared and GRUMPY. I don’t know if his ornery disposition was just his public persona, but it surely sent the message to senior OSHA officials that Senator Metzenbaum took serious his oversight responsibility.
A group of concerned universities put out a statement about how flat funding for the National Institute of Health “puts a generation of science at risk,” and the House Committee on Science and technology has been holding hearings. Naturally, science bloggers have some thoughts on this:
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Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science explains why non-researchers should care about this issue.
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DrugMoneky argues that the pipeline problem isn’t just due to funding amounts – cultural biases against younger investigators during grant review also play a role.
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At Respectful Insolence, NIH-funded surgeon/scientist Orac advocates for reforming the “used car salesman” model of how biomedical research is funded at universtieis.
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Sameer Yousef at Science Progress reports on the grilling of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Acting Director over proposed program cuts, and on Bill Gates’s testimony about keeping the U.S. competitive in the technology field.
Elsewhere:
EPA has set the limit for pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 ppb, despite the unanimous advice of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee to set it between 60-70 ppb (more here on the health effects of ozone). This is hardly a surprise, given the Bush Administration’s record. But in this case, it’s apparently not enough to make a single standard insufficiently protective; administration officials have decided to take on the rulemaking requirements of the Clean Air Act. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin explains:
My experiences tell me that journalists play a critical role in public health improvements; my evidence is anecdotal, but my examples continue to mount. Take Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette and his coverage of the toxic substance ammonium perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8. It’s the chemical used to make Teflon non-stick surfaces. Recently, Ward wrote about a mortality analysis of workers in a 3M facility in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. What’s noteworthy about Ward’s story is not so much the study’s findings, but rather, that he does the yeoman’s work to monitor the EPA’s TSCA 8(e) docket. What do you know—something interesting was submitted by 3M in late February 2008: “Mortality of Employees of an Ammonium Perfluorooctanoate Production Facility.”
In the largest Superfund cleanup settlement ever, W.R. Grace has agreed to pay $250 million to cover government investigation and cleanup costs associated with the asbestos-laden ore the company mined in Libby, Montana.
EPA has already spent roughly $168 million removing asbestos-contaminated soils and other dangerous materials, EPA Emergency Coordinator Paul Peronard told the Missoulian. He estimates that it will take another $175 million to get to the point where cleanup efforts are considered a success – which doesn’t mean that the town will be entirely clean. EPA cleanup efforts started in 2000, and the agency filed suit against W.R. Grace in 2001 to recover costs. The company was already facing thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits, and filed for bankruptcy.
Andrew Schneider, who first drew national attention to Libby’s plight in a series of Seattle P-I articles, points out that W.R. Grace still faces a criminal trial:
On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released a report on the Crandall Canyon mining disaster that claimed nine lives in Utah last August. (Celeste’s posts on the disaster are in our August archive.) A Salt Lake Tribune editorial opines that “Most damning is the revelation that the coal company ignored a direct order from an MSHA inspector and continued to carve coal from a barrier pillar that served as a roof support in the mine.” The SLT’s Robert Gehrke focuses on what MSHA did wrong:
Mine Safety and Health Administration officials yielded to pressure from officials with the mining company, appear to have sped up approval of mining in Crandall Canyon and backed off on safety enforcement actions, records obtained by the committee appear to show.
“MSHA missed significant flaws in [the company's engineering] analysis, dismissed critical findings by MSHA’s own engineer and did not submit the plans - which proposed one of the most hazardous mining operations ever intended - for review by MSHA’s expert technical staff,” stated the report by the committee, chaired by Sen. Edward Kennedy.
In other news:
The Associated Press has another following up on yesterday’s investigative report about pharmaceuticals found in drinking-water supplies. They delve into the issue of who’s studying water supplies, and whether they’re revealing their findings. Accompanying the article is an alphabetical list of cities, so you can see whether your area’s water has been tested, and whether traces of drugs have been found; here in Washington, DC, for instance, tests have turned up carbamazepine, caffeine, ibuprofen, monensin, naproxen and sulfamethoxazole.
It’s nice that AP is supplying this list, because water providers and researchers often stay silent about test results:
A group of state legislators in West Virginia introduced a bill earlier this year to strengthen the State’s laws to protect mine workers who raise concerns about unsafe working conditions. The lead sponsors were Delegate Bill Hamilton (R) who represents the region where the now-abandoned Sago mine and State Senators Jon Blair Hunter (D) and Randy White (D). (I wrote earlier about their effort here.) Several weeks have now passed, and are any of us surprised to learn that the bill was killed in the WV legislative committee?
Nathan Fetty of Mine Safety Project of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and Environment names names of the State Senators who killed the bill. Read the rest of this entry »
On Thursday, the Senate approved legislation that will boost funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, increase the agency’s enforcement power, and effectively ban lead in all children’s products. The House bill passed in December contained similar provisions, although that chamber raised the maximum fine for companies that fail to report product hazards immediately to only $10 million, compared to a Senate cap of $20 million. Compared to the current maximum of $1.8 million, though, those are both big improvements.
There are some ways in which the Senate bill is markedly tougher than the House bill, though – and tougher than what the White House wants. The Washington Post’s Annys Shin explains:
The Associated Press conducted a five-month investigation and found that drug residues have been detected in the drinking water of 24 major U.S. metropolitan areas, which serve roughly 41 million Americans. Concerns about these drug residues have largely focused on wildlife, as estrogen from birth control pills and other hormonal drugs has been interfering with fish reproduction (see past post here). Now, though, the AP is highlighting the number of people exposed and the potential for human health effects:
That’s the word from Georgia’s Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, John Oxendine, during his announcement that the State will impose new safety requirements to prevent combustible dust explosions. The Commissioner’s new rule comes one month after a deadly explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, which killed 12 and severely injured scores of other workers, including 11 who remain in critical condition from the severe burns they suffered in the blast. (More on the burn victims and the long recover ahead for them here.)
The new safety requirement which were issued as emergency rules will apply to every industrial facility in Georgia that creates combustible dust as part of their production process. Thousands of companies will have to comply with the requirements including chemical manufacturers, food-product producers, and timber/wood-working mills. (See the Chemical Safety Board’s list of dust-explosion events here to understand the the diversity of potential combustible dust hazards.)
Read the full story here about Georgia’s new rules, including where Commissioner Oxendine says:
“…he was acting independently of OSHA because, “We felt like we could not rely on OSHA.”
Woosh! That’s quite an on-the-record statement.
The scene was an icy morning in western Maryland, along the Garrett County and Allegany County lines. Mr. Dwight Samuel Colmer, 41, a truck driver with Western Maryland Lumber Company was hauling a load of coal just before 11:00 AM when his truck began to slide. The State of Maryland’s “Motor Vehicle Accident Report” says:
“…hit guard rail, and overturned to the passenger side. Driver was ejected and crushed under the dump truck and died from the injuries.”
The report indicates the incident occurred on a public road called Bartlett Street. Is this a work-related fatality?
Well, it depends on which agency you ask.
It’s been a particularly busy week in global warming news:
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Andrew Schneider at Secret Ingredients reports that unions representing EPA staff have cut off future discussion with EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. Although the unions cite numerous problems with Johnson ignoring scientific and legal staffs’ advice, the release of Johnson’s ridiculous rationale for denying California’s waiver request seemed to be the last straw. (Frank O’Donnell at Gristmill has more on that ridiculousness.)
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DeSmog Blog’s Kevin Grandia and Richard Littlemore report on the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, a.k.a Denial-a-palooza.
- JLowe at Impact Analysis investigates whether we’re trending away from coal-fired power plants, as some optimists have suggested.
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Ana Campoy at Environmental Capital looks at what’s keeping the U.S. from shifting more passengers from cars to mass transit.
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Andrew Wetzler at Switchboard explains how global-warming-induced changes to the Arctic food web may be causing mercury contamination in marine mammals.
Elsewhere:
(Updated 3/7/0 
OSHA announced yesterday that it sent letters to about 14,000 employers across the country, letting them know that their work-related injury rates are higher than the national average. The Agency’s news release does not mention any company names, but an OSHA spokesperson told me that the list of employers will be posted on OSHA’s website tomorrow. (Update 3/7: here’s the link to the zip file.)
Around this time last year, OSHA made a similar announcement and sent letters to employers (about 14,000). I did a little examination of that data and identified some familiar company names: Lowe’s, Home Depot, United Parcel Service, Wal-Mart, and Harley-Davidson. I also noted that the highest percentage of letters (23 percent) were sent to residential nursing care facilities. Does anyone want to make a prediction about how the recipients of OSHA’s letter last year, faired in this year’s assessment?
When the data becomes available tomorrow, I’ll let you know. Or look for yourself and report back here.
Some good news on endangered species, for a change (via Dateline Earth): the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service will retain existing critical habitat currently designated under the Endangered Species Act for marbled murrelet populations on the West Coast. This is a reversal from the Bush Administration, which had been trying to reduce the habitat in order to allow more logging in the old-growth forests where the bird nests. The AP’s Jeff Barnard explains:
In Forbes (via Gristmill), Megha Bahree reports on child labor in India. Children chisel stones, weave carpets, and work in fields for low wages, with little time off. Bahree notes that there’s a particular demand for cheap labor and small, nimble fingers in crops that require manual pollination, like Monsanto’s high-tech cotton. The biotech giant tries to keep its farmers from using illegal child labor, but problems persist. Bahree begins her story with a visit to a cotton field where Jyothi Ramulla Naga — “who says she’s 15 but looks no older than 12″ — earns 20 cents an hour:
At the edge of where Jyothi is working, a rusting sign proclaims, “Monsanto India Limited Child Labour Free Fields.” Jyothi says she has been working in these fields for the past five years, since her father, a cotton farmer, committed suicide after incurring huge debts. On a recent December morning there were teens picking cotton in nearly all of a half-dozen Monsanto farms in Uyyalawada, 250 miles south of India’s high-tech hub Hyderabad. Last year 420,000 laborers under the age of 18 were employed in cottonseed farms in four states across India, estimates Glocal Research, a consultancy in Hyderabad that monitors agricultural labor conditions. Of that total 54% were under the age of 14 and illegally employed.
In other news:
Environmentalism sometimes gets treated as a luxury, something that countries can pursue once they’ve attained a certain GDP. In China, though, galloping economic growth has created an unprecedented environmental crisis, and citizens are organizing to stop industrial pollution, even though they know it might mean fewer jobs.
In today’s Washington Post, Edward Coody reports that residents of southern Chinese fishing towns are protesting a planned chemical facility that has already been rejected by residents of another city:
The State of Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services recently released a report on work-related lead poisoning over the last 12 years (1995-2006). I was shocked to read that 94 percent of the workers (289 men) with blood-lead levels above 25 ug/dL were employed in the mining industry. A follow-up story by Elizabeth Bluemink of the Anchorage Daily News reports that most of the adult blood-lead laboratory results came from the Red Dog lead-zinc mine near Kotzebue, Alaska. Although there is no MSHA standard to protect miners from lead poisoning, Teck Cominco Alaska Inc. has some sort of lead-poisoning prevention program with routine blood-lead testing.
OSHA’s Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke is expected to travel to Port Wentworth, Georgia today, more than 3 weeks after a horrific combustible dust explosion at Imperial Sugar took 12 workers’ lives. Another 11 workers remain in critical condition at a burn treatment center in Augusta. Apparently, pressure from Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA) and Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) convinced Mr. Foulke that a trip to the Dixie Crystals’ community is appropriate. It is, afterall, a workplace disaster on par with the January 2006 Sago disaster which also claimed the lives of 12 men, and arguably more devastating because scores of other workers remain critically injured. I wonder why we expect to see MSHA’s top officials at the scene of mine disasters (e.g., Crandall Canyon, Sago, Quecreek) but we don’t wonder where is OSHA’s Foulke?
The Health Affairs Blog has put up links to its top 10 most-read blog posts of 2007, which gave me a chance to read one I’d missed when it was first posted: Linda Aiken’s myth-busting about the nursing shortage. She starts with the grim statistics:
Currently, the United States is short an estimated 150,000 nurses. Yet over the next decade, more than 650,000 new jobs in nursing will be created. At the same time, an estimated 450,000 nurses will have retired. By 2020, the nurse shortage is expected to increase to 800,000.
This isn’t because we don’t have enough Americans wanting to be nurses, Aiken explains; there are actually plenty of nursing-school applicants, but not nearly enough nursing-school slots for them. It does seem to me that this problem is recognized, and that efforts are underway to address it – for instance, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Building Human Capital program makes grants in this area, and their news digests regularly highlight stories about nursing-school expansions. Although it remains to be seen whether current efforts will be able to add enough nursing-school capacity to meet our needs, I’m more worried about another mistaken belief that Aiken highlights, which may be harder to correct.
