The Trump administration’s attacks on the science and scientists we need to control COVID-19’s toll have been so frequent that it’s easy to become numb to them. But news of Trump administration interference with CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports is still a horrible shock.
An NPR investigation identified nearly 1,000 new cases in Appalachia of the most severe form of black lung disease. The government’s surveillance system recorded just a fraction of them.
These days, there’s a lot of attention on finding new and creative ways to turn around the nation’s opioid abuse and overdose problem. And it’s attention that’s very much needed because the problem is only getting worse.
Re-run from August 11, 2015: There are plenty of lawmakers who criticize OSHA regulations. Perhaps some of them might think differently if they realized the importance of workplace safety regulations for children’s health.
A Massachusetts company that manufactures industrial floatation devices for the off-shore oil/gas industry exposed its workers to toxic dust. Nine cases of work-related asthma among its employees were reported to the state health department.
“Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles,” in the June 5, 1981 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was an economical seven paragraph clinical report cataloging five observed cases, accompanied by an explanatory editorial note on the rarity of this fungal disease. It seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary from MMWR, but turned out to be medical literature’s first report of the disease we now know as AIDS.
A x-ray surveillance program finds nearly four dozen cases of coal workers pneumoconiosis among surface coal miners in the U.S., while coal operators including Alpha Natural Resources and CONSOL Energy insist that workers on strip mining jobs aren’t exposed to enough dust to cause disease.