By Francis Hamilton Rammazzocchi For the second time in two months, America has witnessed a catastrophic industrial explosion involving multiple fatalities. On December 19, 2007, the small T2 Chemicals in Jacksonville, FL, detonated in a towering mushroom cloud, killing four workers. And earlier this week, the Imperial Sugar plant outside of Savannah, Georgia, exploded, killing […]
Bloggers react to Bush’s proposed budget: Science Progress has the totals for science-based agencies Heather Taylor at Switchboard thinks it’s lame Gerald Epstein at SEA probes a mystery $2 billion for Homeland Security R&D Climate Progress bemoans its anti-efficiency stance Amie Newman at RH Reality Check looks at its treatment of women’s health Elsewhere:
Pulitzer-winning Seattle P-I reporter Andrew Schneider is already known to many in the public health world: He broke the Libby, Montana story,  and tracked the asbestos problem across the country. With fellow P-I reporter Robert McClure, he revealed the environmental devastation from mining on public lands in the West. He started writing about the dangers of […]
Weâve written before about how the Consumer Product Safety Commission lacks both the authority and the will to come down hard on companies that keep their unsafe products on the market. Now, Public Citizen has tallied up the time that elapsed between the dates when the CPSC learned of several dangerous products and the dates […]
This 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 […]
In 2003, FRONTLINE, The New York Times, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation teamed up to investigate nine deaths and thousands of injuries at facilities owned by McWane, Inc., a major iron pipe foundry company â and âa portrait emerged of McWane as the most dangerous company in an inherently dangerous business.â The resulting program caught […]
The push for a presidential candidate science debate is stronger than ever: Yesterday, the National Academies joined other prestigious organizations to co-sponsor the effort. “This would provide a nonpartisan setting to educate voters on the candidates’ positions on key science, technology, and health challenges facing the next administration, while giving the candidates an opportunity to […]
A 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 […]
Nearly four decades after the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, it is difficult to find anyone who will argue that it has delivered on its promise to provide safe and healthful working conditions. In 2005 and 2006 I traveled across the country and met with people experienced in worker health […]
Two 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 […]