by Liz Borkowski  It’s International Women’s Day, and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is holding its 51st session with the theme of “the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl child.” Elisha Dunn-Georgiou at RH Reality Check reports that this theme, which you’d expect to get broad […]

This week, two Senate Committees will focus attention on worker safety and health topics.  On Wednesday, February 28, Senator Tom Harkin’s Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, HHS and Education will receive testimony on “Improving Mine Safety: One Year after Sago and Alma.”  On Thursday, March 1, Senator Patty Murray’s Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety of […]

By David Michaels The Bush Administration has been unsuccessful in convincing Congress to pass legislation rolling back public health and environmental protection, even when both the Senate and the House were controlled by Republicans. Some notable examples: attempts to gut the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act failed miserably. With the Democrats in […]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the policymakers’ summary of its 2007 report today, and it was at once a momentous occasion and nothing new. Nothing new, that is, to the people who’ve been following the science for the past few decades and had already figured out that humans are causing global warming and […]

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on “Allegations of Political interference with the Work of Government Climate Change Scientists.” As committee chair Henry Waxman noted in his opening statement, the committee had been investigating this matter for several months, and had good reason to be concerned:

The Science Blogging Conference, held this past weekend at UNC-Chapel Hill, wasn’t just for bloggers. Many of the attendees, particularly science students and educators, came to learn how they could use blogs, and some of them launched their own blogs over the course of the weekend. The journalists in attendance seemed to be immersed in […]

We’re going to start sending out a weekly digest of blog posts via email. If you’d like to sign up, send an email to thepumphandle [at] gmail [dot] com with “subscribe” in the subject line.

by Liz Borkowski   Since November of 2006, all cigarette packages and advertising in Chile have been required to devote half of their space to hard-hitting anti-tobacco messages. In addition to a “These cigarettes are killing you” warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel García Martín, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to […]

The Pump Handle is taking the remainder of the year off. We wish all of our readers and friends a healthy, peaceful 2007.

by Revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine “Letter Report” on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical […]