lead
kkrisberg | September 30, 2016Just 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to bring leading physicians, scientists and advocates together in a consensus on toxic chemicals and neurological disorders in children, says Maureen Swanson. But with the science increasing “exponentially,” she said the time was ripe for a concerted call to action.
Swanson is co-director of Project TENDR (Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks), a coalition of doctors, public health scientists and environmental health advocates who joined forces in 2015 to call for reducing chemical exposures that interfere with fetal and child…
kkrisberg | August 3, 2016At Slate, Gabriel Thompson writes about a little-used legal provision that could go far in helping farmworkers fight wage theft and other labor abuses. A part of the Great Depression-era Fair Labor Standards Act, the statute is known as the “hot goods provision” and it gives the U.S. Department of Labor the authority block products made in violation of labor laws from being shipped across state lines.
Thompson’s story begins with Felix Vasquez, who works in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California, and had successfully worked with legal advocates to recover owed wages from his employer,…
lborkowski | March 22, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas at ProPublica: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds
Anna North in the New York Times: What Planned Parenthood Really Does
Alison Young and Mark Nichols in USA TODAY: Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
David Roberts at Vox: How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers
Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce: Why We Must Build (“We can’t build our way out of the housing…
oracknows | February 17, 2016My state is screwed up, and the epicenter of the fallout from the dysfunctional mess that is the Michigan state government is the city of Flint. As you probably recall, around the holidays a story that had previously been mainly a Michigan story broke nationally in a big way. It is the story of how a combination of the imposition of an emergency manager on the city, epic incompetence at the level of the state and local government, and outright denial of a problem for several months by the veyr state agency (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) charged with making sure that things…
oracknows | January 29, 2016Michigan is a frustrating state to live in these days. Our state government has just shown itself to be epically incompetent in its handling of the Flint water crisis, which I've written about a couple of times before. Our legislature repealed our mandatory motorcycle helmet law, and as a result in this state motorcycles are more donorcycles than ever. Our state has historically had low vaccine uptake, to the point where outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are too common, with pertussis returning with a vengeance. We have naturopathic quacks (but I repeat myself) trying to cure their…
oracknows | January 27, 2016It's been nearly three weeks since I wrote about how an imperative to save money at all costs combined with gross incompetence to poison Flint's children with lead. In (very) brief, the city of Flint decided to switch from buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to a new water source. Unfortunately, the pipeline from that water authority, which was going to draw water from Lake Huron, wasn't scheduled to be completed until 2016. When DWSD learned that Flint was going to switch water sources, it gave a year's notice that it was going to void its long term contract…
oracknows | January 7, 2016This post will be different than my usual post. Let's just say that it has to do with quackery of a different kind than I usually write about here. It's about a public health disaster that was entirely preventable and had nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with government malpractice on an epic scale, right here in my very own state. It's a story that's huge here in Michigan but doesn't seem to be penetrating the national news very much, at least not yet. I suspect that my international readers, most of whom are likely unaware of this story, will have to pick their jaws up off the…
oracknows | May 14, 2014Sometimes, when you're blogging, serendipity strikes. Sometimes this takes the form of having something appear related to something you just blogged about. Yesterday, I discussed one of the biggest supporters of quackery on the Internet, Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, proprietor of NaturalNews.com, one of the quackiest, if not the quackiest site, on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. This time around, I was simply using one of Adams' wonderfully incoherent defenses of alternative medicine thinking to demonstrate how much magical thinking exists at the core of alternative medicine and how…
lborkowski | December 3, 2013In May 2010, an explosion at the Black Mag gunpowder-substitute plant in Colebrook, New Hampshire killed employees Jesse Kennett and Don Kendall. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated and issued 54 citations with penalties totaling $1.2 million. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Health and Safety, said at the time, "Even after a prior incident in which a worker was seriously injured, and multiple warnings from its business partners and a former employee, this employer still decided against implementing safety measures." Safety…
cmonforton | October 30, 2013A marriage of public health science and civil rights is one way to describe the lifework of John Froines, PhD, professor emeritus at UCLA School of Public Health. After a 50-year career in academia and public service, and the untolled contributions from it, Froines was recognized this week by the internationally renowned Collegium Ramazzini.
The nomination letter submitted to the Collegium by his colleagues captures many highlights of Froines’ impact over several decades, such as:
His high-profile role in the 1960’s anti-war and civil rights movements
His position with the Vermont State…
lborkowski | September 24, 2013At the Center for Public Integrity, Sasha Chavkin has the latest news on a mystifying occupational health problem: chronic kidney disease (CKD) in young, previously healthy agricultural workers in Central America, India, and Sri Lanka. Since 2011, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has been following CKD in agricultural workers, which researchers estimate has killed 20,000 people in Central America alone.
Chavkin reports that El Salvador's Legislative Assembly has approved a ban on 53 agrochemicals (some of which have been banned for years in most other countries),…
milhayser | June 4, 2013The will of the voters in Portland, Oregon has endured for more than fifty years, for the fourth time rejecting fluoridation of the city's tap water in a ballot referendum. On Respectful Insolence, Orac writes "public water supplies are a precious commodity. To justify putting something in them requires good evidence of safety and efficacy." And continues "since 1945 the fluoridation of drinking water has reduced tooth decay by 40-70% in children and tooth loss in adults by 40-60%." Orac respects Portlanders' right to more cavities, but says "classic antiscience arguments" won the day at…
egrossman | January 10, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
Next month will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth. Given the last two centuries' stratospheric advances in technology and the past century's progress in human rights policy, one would think that child labor, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and the export of hazardous industrial refuse to poor countries and communities would be a thing of the past. But as several reports released last month show, Dickensian working and living conditions are still very much with us. Children continue to be engaged in hazardous manual labor instead of…
lborkowski | August 26, 2011Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science has put up a terrific two-part post about the early history of leaded gasoline, which bears much of the blame for lead poisoning in workers and the general population. (Paint containing lead is the other main culprit.) Blum's "At the Door of the Loony Gas Building" and "Of Dead Bodies and Dirty Streets" involve plot developments that might sound familiar: product kills people, industry insists product is safe, and back-and-forth about product's safety continues for decades before the product is finally altered, eliminated, or restricted to reduce harm to…
stoat | January 15, 2011Sez the Economist:
For, according to Dr Pyykko's calculations, relativity explains why tin batteries do not work, but lead ones do.
His chain of reasoning goes like this. Lead, being heavier than tin, has more protons in its nucleus (82, against tin's 50). That means its nucleus has a stronger positive charge and that, in turn, means the electrons orbiting the nucleus are more attracted to it and travel faster, at roughly 60% of the speed of light, compared with 35% for the electrons orbiting a tin atom...
If the problem isn't immeadiately obvious to you, pause a moment before proceeding…
terrasig | February 16, 2010Just before Christmas, the US FDA issued a warning regarding a clay-based traditional West African remedy for morning sickness called Nzu or Calabar or Calabash clay. We discussed this topic here when the initial health warning came out from Texas.
The problem with the product is that it contains high levels of lead and arsenic that could be toxic to both fetus and mother.
And now the problem has expanded beyond Texas.
Scott Gavura at his excellent Science-Based Pharmacy blog tweeted earlier that the New York City Department of Health issued a similar warning today:
February 16, 2010 - A…