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By Anthony Robbins On 14 June 2010 stories appeared on the BBC and AFP. Google news displayed 70 story links. The European Journal of Epidemiology had published the research article online on 8 June. The very nice study strongly suggests that about 20% of sporadic cases of Legionnaire's disease…

It's been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn't quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one…

Both OSHA and BP have set up webpages that offer their air monitoring procedures and results related to the Gulf oil disaster. Several worker health and safety experts have examined the data and offered interpretations of the results, including Eileen Senn, a former OSHA inspector. She reviewed…

James Surowiecki's latest New Yorker piece tackles the problem of weakened federal agencies failing to get tough on companies that need it. He notes that leading up to the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Minerals Management Service officials "had let oil companies shortchange the government on oil-…

Senator Chris Dodd held a hearing yesterday to discuss his Livable Communities Act, which would provide grant funding for communities to plan and implement strategies to improve livability. In his statement, he explains: This legislation will provide resources for comprehensive planning. The…

President Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he sounds like a great guy for the job. Julie Rovner reported for Morning Edition earlier today that Republicans are stalling his nomination, which isn't out of the ordinary these days. But…

Melanie Trottman reported in the Wall Street Journal last week that US Representatives James Oberstar and Jerrold Nadler have demanded that Gulf response and recovery workers be provided with respirators (among other protective equipment), but OSHA doesn't think respirators should be required:…

As a group, scientists generally grasp the importance of good data collection systems - but federal-agency budgets rarely let scientists collect as much data as they'd like. Trimming funds for monitoring or surveillance programs may seem like the least painful budget choice when money's tight, but…

The Economist recently published a special report on water, which summarizes the difficulty of ensuring adequate clean water supplies for a growing global population. (It also touches on the related challenge of sanitation, which affects water quality.) Agriculture accounts for nearly 70% of the…

We've been following the story ( see here, here, and here) of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq - which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. National Guard soldiers from four states were stationed…

DemFromCT had a great post up at Daily Kos this past weekend about risk communication. He considers the somewhat unusual circumstances of the Gulf oil spill, noting, "unlike pandemics and hurricanes, this volatile mixture in the water has an equally volatile mix of politics, companies, government…

So far, 5,462 US service members have died from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the Reveres don't have their own blog anymore, I'll post what they've posted for Memorial Day in years past: This is Priscilla Herdman's version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda."

New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here. Note from the editor of New Solutions: The Drawing Board: In the spirit of international solidarity, The Drawing Board has begun featuring articles from activists, researchers, and…

Officials from G8 countries will be gathering in Toronto next month, and scientific bodies from the eight countries (e.g., the Royal Society of Canada and US National Academy of Science) have developed a joint statement about what the G8 should do improve the health of women in children. They begin…

A New York Times article by Jane Gross highlights a costly healthcare problem: avoidable hospital readmissions, which affect one in five patients and account for $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget. (When people talk about readmissions, they're generally referring to an…

On today's Morning Edition, Russell Lewis reported on the memorial service held in Jackson, Mississippi for the 11 workers who died when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th. Host David Greene noted that they've been called the "Forgotten 11," because so much attention has been…

A study published in the open-access journal BMC Immunology suggests an intriguing hypothesis: The explosion of spread of HIV in Africa and then worldwide in the 1950s might be partially explained by the eradication of smallpox and the discontinuation of smallpox vaccination campaigns. The…

The New York Times' Clifford J. Levy reports on violence against at journalists investigating corruption in the Moscow suburbs: Mikhail Beketov had been warned, but would not stop writing. About dubious land deals. Crooked loans. Under-the-table hush money. All evidence, he argued in his newspaper…

By Elizabeth Grossman If the recommendations of the just published President's Cancer Panel report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, become part of a comprehensive national policy agenda, the United States will have a remarkable new cancer prevention strategy - one that…

This week is Bike to Work Week, and tomorrow is Bike to Work Day (the League of American Bicyclists lists events here). I wouldn't have realized this if it weren't for this Washington Post article; cyclists are common enough here in DC that I'm not sure I'd notice a small uptick in their numbers.…

By Elizabeth Grossman It's now a month since the Deepwater Horizon well exploded, and the oil continues to flow. By official count, the response now involves 27,400 civilian and military personnel, 11,000 volunteers, more than 1040 boats, dozens of aircraft, and multiple offshore drilling units. As…

It's only right that BP bear the cleanup costs in the Gulf - but their cleanup responsibilities shouldn't interfere with federal agencies doing their jobs. Two recent news accounts paint a disturbing picture of federal employees taking orders from the multinational corporation that's turned an…

Although most of us are focusing on BP because of the oil rig explosion and gushing well in the Gulf, it's also important to consider the company's safety record at its refineries. Because I keep track of workplace disasters, I knew that BP had earned the distinction of having the worst refinery…

For several years, health professionals have been concerned about the rise in infections from methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - a bacteria that's resistant to several of the antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. CDC estimates that in 2005, there were more than…

We're delighted and honored to be joining the ScienceBlogs community. It's a bittersweet occasion, because we're starting out here just as the Reveres are folding up their stellar public health blog Effect Measure. It's fair to say that The Pump Handle probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the…

Earlier this month, the DC City Council passed the Healthy Schools Act, which will raise nutritional standards for school meals, increase the amount of physical and health education students receive, create school gardens, and do all kinds of other commendable things. The difficult part is that it'…

We're delighted to welcome journalist Elizabeth Grossman as a new writer for The Pump Handle. Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other…

We keep writing about the risks involved with nanotechnology, so it's nice to be able to highlight a potential benefit. Andrew Schneider reports for AOL News that researchers from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology have developed a "nanopatch" that can deliver vaccines…

In Yale Environment 360, Sonia Shah highlights a promising trend: communities in Mexico, China, Tanzania, and elsewhere are adopting non-chemical methods to control the populations of mosquitos that transmit malaria. They've seen their numbers of malaria cases drop, and dramatically reduced their…

The nonprofit organization Human Rights Watch has just released a report describing the risks faced by child farmworkers in the US. Their findings include the following: Children risk pesticide poisoning, serious injury, and heat illness. They suffer fatalities at more than four times the rate of…