The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a report on the future of global health journalism, and it’s not surprising to hear that the traditional model of covering global health is crumbling. KFF commissioned journalists Nellie Bristol and John Donnelly to conduct this research, and their interviews with 51 stakeholders found that challenges abound. Budget […]
Environmental Health
Behind the kitchen door: low wages, few benefits for many U.S. restaurant workers
Annual sales revenue in the nation’s restaurant industry tops $515 billion, but few of the 10.3 million workers in the industry earn a living wage. Those are the findings released today of comprehensive surveys of working conditions for 1,700 restaurant workers employed in Washington DC, Miami and Los Angeles. To date, more than 4,300 workers […]
A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times about a new practice by some employers: refusing to hire smokers: More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity, reduce health care costs and encourage healthier […]
Public Health Practice
Worth Reading: Dieting’s Effects on the Brain, Energy Efficiency, and Giving Birth
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs: On Labor (“My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into the world nearly killed his mother.”) Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: Dieting, Stress, and the Changing Brain. Robert Reich’s Blog at the Christian Science Monitor: US Chamber of Commerce: Obama makes a bargain […]
Last week, Mark Bittman published the New York Times column “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” in which he proposed ways to “make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring.” Among his suggestions was outlawing concentrated animal feeding operations, so it wasn’t surprising to see a […]
I was already tired of President Obama repeating the Republican’s rhetoric about big, bad regulations, how they stifle job creation, put an unnecessary burden on businesses, and make our economy less competitive. He did so last month in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and in his State of the Union address. But yesterday, […]
Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine examined data from 71 Illinois and North Carolina hospitals and found that “patient deaths from pneumonia and acute myocardial infarction were significantly more likely in hospitals where nurses reported schedules with long work hours,” reports Laura Walter in […]
Ben McGrath has an excellent article on “the NFL and the concussion crisis” in the January 31st issue of the New Yorker. It’s well worth a read (though it might change the way you see the Superbowl), but the thing I want to highlight is the roles of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times […]
Injury Control & Violence
Labor Dept forges ahead to strengthen mine safety, but steps back on other worker health and safety rule
The contrast is striking. Look at the screenshot of the outcome of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ (OIRA) review of two Labor Department rules to address flaws in our worker health and safety system. One is a proposal by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to crack down on mine operators who […]
Some villages in Pakistan’s Sindh province are still underwater following August’s floods, and a new UNICEF survey has found that nearly one-fourth of the children under five there are malnourished. The deputy head of UNICEF Pakistan, Karen Allen, calls conditions “shockingly bad” and compares them to “the worst of the famine in Ethiopia, Darfur, and […]