cmonforton | November 3, 2016Kim Krisberg and I were in Denver this week at APHA’s 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. In our blog posts from earlier this week (here, here, here) we recapped just a few of the scientific sessions and events from the week. Below are some highlights from the final day at the meeting. You can read many more courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Public health in the headlines: How does news coverage impact health?: Media. It’s everywhere these days. So, it’s not surprising that it impacts our health and behaviors as well as our…
cmonforton | November 3, 2016The American Public Health Association (APHA) adopted 11 new policy statements which will guide its work in the coming years. They include:
Raising the minimum wage: The policy calls on states to increase their minimum wage, index the minimum wage to inflation, and prohibit state-government preemption of municipal minimum wage policies. Among other things, the new APHA policy also recommends research on the effects of living wages on public assistance budgets.
Reducing exposure to highly fluorinated chemicals: The policy calls on Congress to fund research on alternatives to perfluoroalkyl and…
cmonforton | November 2, 2016Kim Krisberg and I are currently in Denver at APHA’s 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. In yesterday’s blog post, Kim recapped just a few of the scientific sessions and events from Sunday and Monday. Below are some highlights from Tuesday and you can read many more courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
How can we reduce gun violence? Less politics, more working together: The gun violence epidemic in America got worse in 2016. As of October, more than 40 people every day have died in the U.S. by gunfire, according to the…
kkrisberg | November 1, 2016Celeste Monforton and I are currently in Denver at the American Public Health Association's (APHA) 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. The meeting is packed with hundreds of scientific sessions, leading public health researchers and new findings on just about any public health topic you can imagine. Below are some highlights of the past few days, courtesy the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Trees don’t just make neighborhoods pretty. They can also save lives: With flowers in the spring, lush green leaves in the summer and changing colors…
lborkowski | October 31, 2016Last week, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas temporarily enjoined provisions of the Obama Administration’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executiv Order (EO 13673), which would require companies bidding on federal contracts worth more than $500,000 to report whether or not they have been cited in the last three years for labor law violations. (In their initial bid, they simply have to check a box to say whether or not this is the case.) This temporary stay will be in effect until the court decides the case brought by Associated Builders and Contractors of Southeast Texas…
garrettbrown | October 28, 2016I have just returned from a whirlwind trip in Vietnam inspecting a Korean-owned garment factory complex of 10,000 workers that produces university logo apparel for Nike and clothes for a dozen brand-name companies like Pink and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. Lots of problems with the working conditions and a non-existent occupational health and safety program – more to come later on all that. We conducted our inspection on behalf of the Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium.
But with wages in China becoming “too expensive,” Vietnam has become the new destination for many brands in apparel,…
kkrisberg | October 28, 2016While health policy hasn’t been at the forefront of this year’s presidential election, the next person to sit in the White House could have a transformative effect on health care access, affordability and inequity. Of course, with so many variables in play, it’s hard to predict what either candidate could realistically accomplish on the health care front. However, a new report might provide some insightful clues.
Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the report complied results from 14 national public opinion polls from various sources and conducted as recently as…
kkrisberg | October 26, 2016Charles Ornstein at ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh at the Virginian-Pilot investigate the man known as Dr. Orange for his “fervent” defense against claims that exposures to Agent Orange sickened American veterans. A part of their long-running investigation “Reliving Agent Orange,” this most recent article reports that the Veterans Administration has repeatedly cited Dr. Orange’s (real name: Alvin Young) work to deny compensation to veterans, even though many argue Young’s work is compromised by inaccuracies, inconsistencies and omissions. In addition, the very chemical companies that make…
lborkowski | October 25, 2016A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Eric Boodman at STAT: Night sweats, bloody cough — and a diagnosis that turned a doctor into an activist
Laura Fink in The San Diego Union-Tribune: Debt of gratitude owed to Trump accusers
Eliza Barclay at Vox: How to confront sexist “locker room talk,” according to science
Jie Jenny Zou at Center for Public Integrity: State cutbacks, recalcitrance hinder Clean Air Act enforcement
Joerg Drewke in Guttmacher Policy Review: “Fungibility”: The Argument at the Center of a 40-Year Campaign to Undermine Reproductive Health and Rights
Lenny Bernstein and Scott…
egrossman | October 24, 2016The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the first five chemicals it will “fast-track” under the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century (LCSA). The EPA now has until June 22, 2019 to identify where these chemicals – all considered persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic – are used, how exposures occur, and propose possible restrictions on their use.
“The threats from persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals [PBTs] are well-documented,” Jim Jones, assistant administrator in EPA’s office of chemical safety and pollution prevention, explained in a…
kkrisberg | October 21, 2016In September 2015, New York farmworker Crispin Hernandez was fired after his employers saw him talking with local workers’ rights advocates. But instead of backing down, Hernandez filed suit against the state. And if he prevails, it could help transform the often dangerous and unjust workplace conditions that farmworkers face to put food on all of our tables.
Officially filed May 10, 2016, Hernandez v. State of New York demands that the state provide the same constitutional protections to farmworkers as it does for other workers. Right now, according to the New York state constitution, all…
kkrisberg | October 20, 2016In troubling public health news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported just yesterday that combined cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia in the U.S. have climbed to the highest number on record.
With the release of its “Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2015” report, the agency documented more than 1.5 million cases of chlamydia, nearly 400,000 cases of gonorrhea and about 24,000 cases of primary and secondary syphilis. Syphilis clocked the largest increase from 2014 to 2015 at 19 percent, gonorrhea increased by nearly 13 percent and chlamydia rose by nearly 6…
kkrisberg | October 19, 2016After years of alarming increases in child and adult obesity and billions spent to treat related medical problems, one might think health organizations and soda companies would be on firmly opposite sides of the fence. But a new study finds that a surprising number of health groups accept soda sponsorship dollars, inadvertently helping to polish the public image of companies that actively lobby against obesity prevention efforts.
“To be honest, it was really shocking,” study co-author Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told…
cmonforton | October 18, 2016The Casper Star-Tribune’s Heather Richards profiles the struggle of Malco Bielefeld, 53, a roughneck who was seriously injured on the job.
“Once, he viewed the world from the top of a 70-foot oil derrick. …He would use his whole body to keep balance, attaching solid steel piping that weighed thousands of pounds. Now, he struggles to walk to the mailbox.”
Richards explains that Bielefeld, who worked for 13 years in oil and gas fields, suffered an injury in 2015.
“[He] was struck by blocks that fell from a workover rig in the Salt Creek Oil field. … The heavy pulley equipment crushed Bielefeld’…
kkrisberg | October 14, 2016Another day, another study on the benefit of vaccines. This time, it’s a study on the economic cost of vaccine-preventable diseases among U.S. adults — a cost that likely surpasses your wildest guesses.
Published this week in Health Affairs, the study found that vaccine-preventable diseases affecting adults cost the American economy $8.95 billion in 2015, with unvaccinated adults accounting for $7.1 billion of that total. To conduct the study, researchers examined the economic burden associated with 10 vaccines that protect against hepatitis A; hepatitis B; shingles (or herpes zoster); human…
kkrisberg | October 13, 2016If you look at the numbers, there’s no doubt that the Affordable Care Act is making a positive difference. In fact, just last month, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the nation’s uninsured rate had hit a record low. At the same time, the health reform law wasn’t intended as a silver bullet and a number of problems remain. One of those problems is known as “churning.”
“Churning” describes changes in a person’s insurance coverage over time and it’s an issue that can have a significant impact on a patient’s continuity of care and health status. Of course, changes in insurance coverage are…
egrossman | October 12, 2016Four years ago, in August 2012, a corroded pipe at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California ruptured, resulting in a catastrophic fire and a toxic vapor plume that engulfed, not only the refinery, but also spread over the northeastern San Francisco Bay area. Nineteen Chevron employees were caught up in the vapor cloud and one was trapped by a fireball. Remarkably, all survived. In the next several days, some 15,000 people in communities surrounding the refinery sought medical attention for symptoms related to smoke exposure. According to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, among the reported…
kkrisberg | October 11, 2016At the Denver Post, John Ingold and Monte Whaley authored a year-long investigative series into the dangerous conditions facing Colorado’s oil and gas workers, the role of subcontracting in heightening worker safety risks, and the lack of employer accountability and oversight. The series, “Drilling through danger,” noted that 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, with 2014 being the second-most lethal year for oil and gas workers in Colorado in a decade. According to the newspaper’s analysis, there was about one oil and gas worker death per every 12 rigs…
lborkowski | October 10, 2016Just before the end of its September session, Congress finally did what public health officials had been begging it to do for more than seven months and approved substantial funding for Zika response efforts. The $1.1 billion package fell short of the $1.9 billion President Obama requested back in February – and, according the tally from POLITICO’s Dan Diamond, it came 233 days after Obama’s request and after 23,135 cases of Zika virus were identified in US states and territories.
Unlike an earlier House bill, this funding measure doesn’t prohibit funding from going to Planned Parenthood –…
kkrisberg | October 7, 2016Corporal punishment in America’s public schools seems like a relic of the past — a practice we had surely banned long ago. The reality, however, is that it’s perfectly legal to physically discipline students as young as preschoolers in 19 states. And according to a new report, corporal punishment is most often used against black students and students with disabilities.
Released earlier this week as a “Social Policy Report” from the Society for Research in Child Development, the report found that in Alabama and Mississippi, black children are at least 51 percent more likely to be physically…