June 22, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 2Comment

The ScienceBlogs Book Club has come back to life, and is now featuring Mark Pendergrast’s Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Mark Pendergrast’s introductory post is well worth a read. He describes Alexander Langmuir, the “visionary leader” who founded the Epidemic Intelligence Service within the CDC in 1951; gives […]

June 17, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 4Comment

It’s appropriate for BP to dedicate $20 billion to an escrow fund for oil-spill claims, and I hope the fund’s independent administration will allow for quick payment of claims. Nicholas Beaudrot points out that the fund’s structure means BP has an incentive to resolve claims quickly – in contrast to the 20 years that it […]

June 16, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH

In 1999, two machinists who worked next to each other at a Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in North Haven, Connecticut were diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and fatal brain cancer. Their wives started compliling information about other employees at the same company who’d received similar diagnoses, and focused attention on the workers’ illneses […]

June 14, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 1Comment

It’s been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn’t quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one industrial hygienist’s recommendations […]

June 11, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 8Comment

James Surowiecki’s latest New Yorker piece tackles the problem of weakened federal agencies failing to get tough on companies that need it. He notes that leading up to the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Minerals Management Service officials “had let oil companies shortchange the government on oil-lease payments, accepted gifts from industry representatives, and, in some […]

June 10, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 4Comment

Senator Chris Dodd held a hearing yesterday to discuss his Livable Communities Act, which would provide grant funding for communities to plan and implement strategies to improve livability. In his statement, he explains: This legislation will provide resources for comprehensive planning. The design of our communities is often seen as primarily a local issue, but […]

June 9, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 7Comment

President Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he sounds like a great guy for the job. Julie Rovner reported for Morning Edition earlier today that Republicans are stalling his nomination, which isn’t out of the ordinary these days. But the part of her story that […]

June 8, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 14Comment

Melanie Trottman reported in the Wall Street Journal last week that US Representatives James Oberstar and Jerrold Nadler have demanded that Gulf response and recovery workers be provided with respirators (among other protective equipment), but OSHA doesn’t think respirators should be required: David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Department of Labor’s OSHA, said in an […]

June 4, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 2Comment

As a group, scientists generally grasp the importance of good data collection systems – but federal-agency budgets rarely let scientists collect as much data as they’d like. Trimming funds for monitoring or surveillance programs may seem like the least painful budget choice when money’s tight, but then sometimes it turns out that relatively small savings […]

June 3, 2010 Liz Borkowski, MPH 1Comment

The Economist recently published a special report on water, which summarizes the difficulty of ensuring adequate clean water supplies for a growing global population. (It also touches on the related challenge of sanitation, which affects water quality.) Agriculture accounts for nearly 70% of the world’s water use, although that number varies by region. In the […]