August 5, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 6Comment

If you haven’t already, go read Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Letting Go.” As a surgeon, Gawande knows how doctors tend to death with terminally ill patients, both because of their training and their ordinary human tendencies. As a writer, he knows how to weave together personal stories and explanations into a seamless portrait of […]

August 4, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 21Comment

Last week, two workers were killed in an Illinois grain elevator. Alejandro Pacas, 19, and Wyatt Whitebread, 14, were engulfed by shelled corn in the Mount Carroll grain facility, which is owned by Haasbach, LLC. A third victim, Will Piper, 20, was trapped for approximately six hours before responders were able to remove him from […]

August 3, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 3Comment

BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and may soon be “killed” for good, but fixing the widespread damage from the disaster will take years. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has has released a report (supported by the Children’s Health Fund) based on […]

August 1, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH

The Army’s Suicide Prevention Task Force has just released a report on suicide prevention, which they began 15 months ago in response to an increase in Army suicides (news release here, report here). In his letter introducing the report, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Chiarelli summarizes the sobering findings: In Fiscal […]

July 29, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 1Comment

If you’ve got four minutes, go watch OSHA’s video of Diane Lillicrap speaking on crane safety. Diane’s son Steven Lillicrap, 21, was killed by a crane at a Missouri construction site in 2009. I wrote yesterday about the importance of OSHA’s new crane rule, but Diane conveys it in a much more powerful way.

July 28, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 5Comment

Earlier today, OSHA published its long-awaited final rule on cranes and derricks in construction. We’ve been following this rule’s slow progress for two years now, since a March 2008 crane collapse at a New York construction site killed six workers and a tourist. At the time, Celeste pointed out, “OSHA acknowledges that as many as […]

July 27, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 4Comment

The Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mounted a nine-month investigation into the global trade on asbestos, and teamed up with the BBC’s International News Services to document the asbestos industry’s activities in Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. What they found is deeply troubling: Our investigation concluded […]

July 26, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 5Comment

In the New York Times, Abby Goodnough and Katie Zezima highlight the problem of “drugged driving,” or driving while under the influence of a drug that impairs driving ability: The behavioral effects of prescription medication vary widely, depending not just on the drug but on the person taking it. Some, like anti-anxiety drugs, can dull […]

July 22, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH

The Oregonian’s Julie Sullivan has been following the story of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq – which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. (Oregonian stories are here; also see our past posts on the subject here, here, and here.) […]

July 20, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 10Comment

Last year, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting New Yorker piece that compares present-day efforts to control healthcare costs with early 20th-century efforts to increase US farming productivity. The quest for more farming productivity succeeded not because of any grand, sweeping reform, he explains, but because the government, through the USDA, invested in pilot programs, scientific […]