Research
cmonforton | December 20, 2012Last week, my home State of Michigan became the 24th one to enact "right-to-work" legislation. I'm sure the great labor leader Walter Reuther (1907-1970) rolled over in his grave when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed the anti-union bill into law.
Workers coming together to negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions created the middle class in America. Belonging to a union means workers can be more secure that they won't be fired arbitrarily, and have more power to receive skills training and guard against unsafe working conditions. This latter point is an underlying…
cmonforton | December 12, 2012A recently published case-control study involving more than 2,100 women in southern Ontario, Canada reported a strong association between being employed in the automotive plastics industry and breast cancer. The researchers recruited the 'case' subjects between 2002-2008 among newly diagnosed breast cancer patients and the randomly-selected controls from the same geographic area. The researchers examined a variety of risk factors for breast cancer (e.g., reproductive history, age) and collected data on the women's employment history. Elevated odds of breast cancer were found among women…
lborkowski | December 7, 2012by Kim Krisberg
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. For all practical purposes, they work in regulation-free environments without the benefits of labor, wage and health protections or oversight. There are no HR departments in people's homes.
But a new survey released in November has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving…
lborkowski | December 5, 2012This is a bonus addition to a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. To read the three-part series, which explores the science of pain management as well as physicians' and public health workers' roles in preventing opioid abuse and overdose, click here, here and here.
by Kim Krisberg
"If you really look at how pain affects people and what it means to have pain...you start to view it more as a social phenomenon."
These are words from Dr. Daniel Carr, a…
lborkowski | November 30, 2012This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose problem. Read the previous stories in the series here and here. (We'll be publishing a bonus addition to the series next week — a discussion with Dr. Daniel Carr, director of the Pain Research, Education and Policy Program at Tufts University.)
by Kim Krisberg
A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the…
lborkowski | November 26, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's often said that hard work never hurt anybody. It's a cliché with which occupational health folks and thousands of injured workers would undoubtedly disagree. And while tragic and often preventable physical injuries may be the easiest to see and document, other work-related health risks are much harder to pick up on. One such risk is depression.
Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky, as such research is often based on self-reporting methods that can leave…
lborkowski | November 16, 2012This is the second in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. (The first post is here.) The series will explore the science and policy of balancing the need for treatment as well as the need to prevent abuse and diversion. This week's story looks at clinical efforts to reduce the risk of opioid abuse and overdose while still caring for patients; the next story will explore the role of public health officials in curbing opioid abuse.
by Kim Krisberg
Since…
lborkowski | November 9, 2012by Kim Krisberg
This is the first in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. The series will explore the science and policy of balancing the need for treatment as well as the need to prevent abuse and diversion. This week's story provides a look at the field of pain medicine and the patients it cares for; next week's story will look at the educational and risk reduction approaches physicians are employing to address opioid addiction and overdose.
It took…
cmonforton | November 2, 2012I was eight years old on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" was the slogan for us kids. When we'd see a newscast with factory stacks spewing thick gray smoke we'd say "yuck." We'd hold our noses when tailpipes of junker cars belched exhaust. In our minds, air pollution was a bad thing because of what we could see and smell. We sure didn't think about it as something that was cutting short people's lives.
One of the first prospective U.S. studies to demonstrate an association between air pollutants and premature mortality was published in the New England…
lborkowski | October 12, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Researchers studying workers’ compensation claims have found that almost one in 12 injured workers who begin using opioids were still using the prescription drugs three to six months later. It's a trend that, not surprisingly, can lead to addiction, increased disability and more work loss – but few doctors are acting to prevent it, explains a new report from the Massachusetts-based Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI).
Report researchers looked at longer-term opioid use in 21 states and how often doctors followed recommended treatment guidelines for monitoring…
lborkowski | October 3, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle's new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. View the first post of the series here, and check back at the "Public Health Classics" category for more in the future.
By Sara Gorman
The current state of public health research is increasingly aware of the effects of various kinds of inequality on health. Especially in the U.S. and other developed countries, the burden of chronic, non-communicable diseases is especially high among low-income individuals. Public health…
lborkowski | September 28, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's not news that unemployment is bad for a person's health. But it turns out that just the threat of unemployment is bad as well.
A recent study, published in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that perceived job insecurity is also linked to poor health outcomes, even among those who had jobs during the recession. Researchers found that perceived job insecurity was linked with "significantly higher odds" of fair or poor self-reported health as well as recent symptoms suggesting depression and anxiety attacks. The findings…
lborkowski | September 18, 2012By Sara Gorman
Recent biomedical advances in AIDS research have allowed political figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proclaim that the phenomenon of a generation without HIV/AIDS is within reach. But how well-founded is this optimism? A recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine asks this very question and concludes that there is ample reason for scientific optimism but that the global resources needed to achieve the eradication of this illness are simply not being deployed properly.
Yet the science itself does not indicate that the possibility of the…
lborkowski | September 4, 2012In honor of (US) Labor Day, Celeste Monforton and I have started what we intend to be a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012 is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each…
cmonforton | July 9, 2012If it wasn't such a terrible disgrace, an example of our malfunctioning regulatory system, and a public health failure, I'd have to pinch myself that three of my favorite investigative reporters have worked together to expose it. Ken Ward, Jr. of the Charleston (WV) Gazette, Jim Morris of the Center for Public Integrity (and rising star Chris Hamby) and Howard Berkes of National Public Radio (NPR) have teamed up to write about black lung disease among U.S. coal miners. The first of their stories were reported yesterday in the Gazette and at Hard Labor, the Center for Public Integrity's…
cmonforton | June 19, 2012Researchers with the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) report in the current issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (Vol. 16, No. 23) on the prevalence of dust diseases of the lungs among U.S. surface coal miners. Based on chest x-rays performed on 2,238 workers who work at surface/strip coal mines in 16 States, 46 of them (about 2 percent) had radiographic evidence of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP). The median age of the workers with CWP was only 56 years; the median years of mining experience was 33 years. Especially troubling is the…
lborkowski | June 15, 2012Yesterday, that National Academies Press celebrated its first year of offering free PDFs of many of its reports. NAP reported in an anniversary email that website visitors have downloaded over 1.3 million PDF versions of books -- and that over the next year NAP will be adding more books (new and old alike) to the list of free downloads. Among the most downloaded so far are:
The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health
Relieving Pain America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research
To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System
The reports on nursing…
cmonforton | June 12, 2012A panel of scientific experts convened by the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded today that diesel engine exhaust is carcinogenic to humans. Previously, the IARC classification for diesel exhaust was "probably carcinogenic to humans," but with the publication of additional epidemiological and toxicological studies over the last 20 years, the expert panel determined there was sufficient evidence to change the compound's cancer designation. The IARC panel wrote:
"The scientific evidence was reviewed thoroughly by the Working Group…
cmonforton | June 11, 2012Tobacco companies did it. Asbestos-peddlers did it. Chromium users did it. The list goes on and on. When polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products feel threatened by scientific evidence that their pet compound is carcinogenic to humans, they will do everything money can by to avoid the "cancer-causing" label.
The latest example comes from diesel-engine manufacturers. Their efforts come just in time for a meeting of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) scheduled for June 5-12, 2012. IARC, an agency within the World Health Organization, is convening an expert…
catdynamics | June 5, 2012there is a curious result in behavioural economics, which shows that paying people to do what they like to do, sometimes provides a disincentive for them to do it, and people correspondingly lower their effort to do the task.
The example I recently came across, from the 7 Rules of Behavioural Economics, or some such, was that if you pay people to have their friends for dinner, they entertain less.
But, enough about the decline of intradepartmental socialization...
The reason I thought of this, is that yesterday we congratulated a colleague on a nice result, and another colleague asked some…