By Michael Silverstein Thirty-five years after the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the promise of worker protection remains substantially unfulfilled. Over the past several months, I have been traveling across the country and talking with people experienced in worker health and safety to gather ideas about what we can do to protect […]
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by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz Mr. Milkey (for the State of Massachusetts): Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. Itâs the troposphere. Justice Scalia: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before Iâm not a scientist. (Laughter) Justice Scalia: Thatâs why I donât want to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth. [PDF […]
The blogosphere has been buzzing all week about Andrew Revkin’s New York Times piece on the new “middle stance” in the climate debate. Real Climate authors have one of the most comprehensive responses to it (as well as links to several other bloggers’ posts); Revkin himself responds in the extensive comment thread. On other topics:
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 âThese cigarettes are killing youâ warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel GarcÃa MartÃn, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to […]
Scientific Integrity & Ethics
Rush to Judgement : industry consultant too quick to give IBM a clean bill of health
by Dick Clapp The latest issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine contains a commentary from Ken Mundt, a consultant with ENVIRON International Corporation, on âCancer incidence among semiconductor and electronic storage device workers,â an IBM-funded study by Bender et al appearing in the same issue. Mundt says that âthe study offers some reassurance that at this […]
The Pump Handle is taking the remainder of the year off. We wish all of our readers and friends a healthy, peaceful 2007.
Flavoring Workers' Lung (Popcorn/Diacetyl)
Union Petition for Diacetyl Standard Advances in California
By David Michaels In July, two unions, backed by a group of scientists, petitioned both federal OSHA and California OSHA to issue rules to protect workers from diacetyl, the chemical implicated in dozens of cases of lung disease in the food industry (See our earlier post âArtificial Butter Flavor is (Still) Killing Workersâ). Federal OSHA […]
The biggest news in science and public health was the tragic, though not unexpected, guilty verdict in the Libyan trial of six medics accused of deliberately infecting patients with HIV. Several members of the scientific community, mobilized by Nature reporter Declan Butler and several bloggers, drew attention to the scientific evidence demonstrating the medics´ innocence […]
By David Michaels It came as no surprise to some observers that VaxGen (a biotech company in Brisbane, California) failed to meet the specifications of its contract to provide the US government with 75 million doses of a new anthrax vaccine. VaxGen has been playing fast and loose for quite some time â most notably […]