How can we bring a public health perspective to shale gas production? The latest issue of the journal New Solutions (now free online) has some suggestions.
Environmental Health
New study lifts the lid on unhealthy kitchen conditions in migrant farmworker housing
For many migrant farmworkers, the health risks don’t stop at the end of the workday. After long, arduous hours in the field, many will return to a home that also poses dangers to their well-being. And quite ironically for a group of workers that harvests our nation’s food, one of those housing risks is poor cooking and eating facilities.
The headlines in Detroit are focused on the city’s financial woes, but the city’s future is at additional risk because of lead poisoned children in the city’s public schools.
Environmental Health
A food safety inspector’s warning about chemicals and bacteria under USDA’s proposed poultry inspection “modernization”
After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like “window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by.”
EPA delays an announcement about a carcinogen found in some tap water on the advice of a scientific panel that’s ostensibly unbiased — but an investigation into panelists’ backgrounds finds some troubling conflicts of interest.
Education
Study: Despite health risks tied to industrial food animal production, health departments have little involvement
A couple years ago, two public health researchers attended a hearing about the possible expansion of an industrial food animal production facility. During the hearing, a community member stood up to say that if the expansion posed any hazards, the health department would surely be there to protect the people. The two researchers knew that probably wasn’t the case.
A new report by the European Environment Agency offers more than a dozen case studies for us to examine the question: could we have taken action earlier to prevent harm to human health or the environment?
Environmental Health
Demands for safer working conditions, fair wages drew Martin Luther King to Memphis
Today we commemorate the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated in Memphis, TN in April 1968. The civil rights leader was visiting Memphis to support hundreds of city sanitation workers in their demands for safer working conditions and dignity on the job.
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past. But a new four-year study he’s leading could change all that.
A study on use of new cookstoves in India finds that solving soot problems isn’t as simple as just giving people new stoves. Long-term use of equipment provided by aid groups is also an issue in water and sanitation projects.