regulation
sb admin | March 6, 2008(Updated 3/7/08)Â
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…
sb admin | March 3, 2008The 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…
sb admin | March 3, 2008OSHA'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…
sb admin | February 29, 2008For the first time, beginning on April 29, it will be unlawful for employers in the mining industry to expose workers to asbestos concentrations higher than 0.1 fiber (per cubic meter of air) over an 8-hour shift. MSHA published today a new exposure limit for asbestos to replace a 2.0 fiber limit which has been on the books since 1978 when the agency was created. Other U.S. workers, in contrast, began getting protection from an OSHA asbestos standard in 1971 and it was revised several times over years---from 2 fibers, to 0.5, to 0.2 and 0.1----to make it more protective of …
revere | February 27, 2008I'm away from home and I did something really, really bad to my back. I could hardly tie my boots this morning (boots needed; it is snowing like stink up here). One of my fellow scientists took one look at me and said, "I guess you need some Vioxx." Then he laughed. Since I hardly know this person I don't think he was trying to kill me -- he wouldn't have laughed, then, I'm guessing. But Vioxx has killed some other people before the FDA finally acknowledged it could do that. They were soundly (and appropriately) criticized for keeping too quiet. Now, it seems, some are complaining because…
sb admin | February 24, 2008That's the headline from an editorial in today's Savannah Morning News, laying responsibility for the broken workplace safety regulatory system on the Secretary of Labor's desk. The words of editorial page editor, Tom Barton, sound like those I've heard before when a workplace disaster strikes a town. Journalists, community leaders, and family member victims are appalled to learn that OSHA and MSHA don't work as well as our civics books would lead us to believe. It's not until the deaths, injuries and heartbreaks hit your own backyard, do people care enough to figure it out.
I don't…
revere | February 22, 2008Recently we posted on the insanity of requiring informed consent for posting a hygiene checklist in the ICU. This week the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in.
Here's some background from the NEJM Commentary:
About 80,000 catheter-related bloodstream infections occur in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs) each year, causing as many as 28,000 deaths and costing the health care system as much as $2.3 billion. If there were procedures that could prevent these infections, wouldn't we encourage hospitals to introduce them? And wouldn't we encourage the development, testing, and dissemination…
sb admin | February 21, 2008There are a number of memorable quotes in the Center for Study of Responsive Law's newly released report "Undermining Safety: A Report on Coal Mine Safety."  In one section, report author Christopher W. Shaw discusses the mining industry's lobbying for "targeted inspections" (a la the OSHA model) instead of the current requirement for mandatory quarterly inspections. The AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer Richard L. Trumka---a former coal miner---derided the notion of making MSHA more like OSHA:
"OSHA reminds me of an 18-year old Mexican Chihauhua dog that's lost its teeth and hides…
sb admin | February 20, 2008As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but thatâs not the whole story. Itâs also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply arenât strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems weâre facing and offer…
revere | February 20, 2008The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem:
More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…
sb admin | February 20, 2008OSHA's Regional Office in New York announced the successful resolution of a retaliation case filed by a worker who was discharged by his employer after he expressed concerns about entering a workspace which had just been "bombed" with an insecticide. The case began more than two years ago at a residential housing complex in Flushing, NY, called Second Housing Co. Inc., and was resolved under a consent order in which the employer agreed to pay more than $66,000 in back wages to the worker.
Under Section 11(c) of the OSH Act:
"No person shall discharge or in any manner discriminate…
revere | February 19, 2008Even in the world of giant beef recalls in the US this one stands out: 143 million pounds. This dwarfs (by a factor of four) the previous recall record of 35 million pounds, and as the AP report observes, amounts to two hamburgers for every man, woman and child in the United States. This one has an added twist: not just safety but animal cruelty:
The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to February 1, 2006, that came from Chino [California]-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains.…
sb admin | February 18, 2008Kudos! to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) for providing an update on their investigation of the devastating explosion at the Imperial Sugar/Dixie Crystals refinery near Port Wentworth, Georgia. As I've noted in previous posts, because the CSB makes it part of their business to provide regular update for the publicâeven if they don't have much at all to reportâtheir effort increases the likelihood that worker and environmental safety and health issues will be covered by the press. In turn, it means that these critical public health topics stay in the publicâs and…
sb admin | February 16, 2008The final deceased victim of the February 7 explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery has been recovered from the scene, and a ninth victim, Mr. Michael Fields, 40, succumbed to his severe injuries earlier today at the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, Georgia.  U.S. Senators Johnny Iasakson (R-GA) and Saxby Chamblis (R-GA) met today with victims' families as well as about 200 employees from the plant. Senator Isakson's news release said:
"On my visit this morning, I saw the absolute devastation of the tragic explosion at the Imperial Sugar facility. ...We pledged to them our…
sb admin | February 15, 2008Friends and colleagues continue to offer lovely memorials to Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who passed away on February 11. (here, here)  Human Rights Watch noted in their tribute  he was an "unwavering advocate for fundamental rights," and "his remarkable and sustained efforts on behalf of vulnerable and otherwise voiceless people." Â
Indeed, for Cong. Lantos, human rights was not only about the politically oppressed in far away places. The vulnerable and voiceless included workers who were injured or otherwise harmed by hazards on the job, or those discriminated against for…
sb admin | February 13, 2008Fire suppression experts from a North Carolina firm are providing assistance in Port Wentworth, Georgia at the Imperial Sugar factory. After the devastating explosion five days ago on Thursday evening, February 7, the fire continues to burn.  Two workers remain missing in the fire and debris. Another six perished at the scene and 16 remain in critical condition. Three injured workers have been released from the hospital to continue their recovery at the Joseph M Still Burn Center (More here.) The clinic has a hopeful motto: "Though not every scar can be removed it is our …
sb admin | February 6, 2008This month's Environmental Health Perspectives features an informative but disturbing article by Andrea Hricko entitled  "Global Trade Comes Home". It describes the adverse impact on communities of the "goods movement" system, where imports to the U.S.---electronics, food, toys, furniture--- make their way from waterfront ports to trains and trucks, and into warehouses and to our neighborhood stores. Hricko, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, with first-hand experience working with families who live near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, paints the…
sb admin | February 5, 2008A group of advocates for miners and their families sent a rulemaking petition to MSHA on February 1, asking the agency to improve its regulations governing the training that mine workers receive about their statutory rights. The Petition for Rulemaking was submitted by the West Virginia Mine Safety Project, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, United Support & Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, and the United Mine Workers, and calls for significant improvements in the content and manner in which all U.S. mine workers---whether at coal, gold, stone, or other mine or mill---learn…
sb admin | February 4, 2008Two high-tech communication firms, Venture Design Services, Inc and Helicomm, Inc., teamed up to create a wireless tracking system for underground miners, and it is the first product of its kind to be approved by MSHA since the Sago, WV disaster. That 2006 event, which claimed the lives of 12 coal miners and forever changed the lives of their families, coworkers and community, was the impetus for the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act (MINER Act) and its requirements for wireless tracking systems.
Helicomm has been using the CONSOL Energy's Big Branch mine in Mingo County, WV…
sb admin | January 31, 2008Back in 1994, 240 coal miners in Hirwaun, Wales bought the Tower Colliery where they were employed. The UK government was de-nationalizing the coal mines and the pit was scheduled to close. The miners took charge of their own livelihood, used their severence-layoff pay and borrowed money, to buy the coal mine.
"In its first year, one of the oldest continuously worked pits in the world made a profit of two million pounds (~ $1 million US) ...[and] provided jobs for hundreds of miners."Â (Reuters here)]
Last week, the miners and the community said their final goodbye to the Tower Colliery…