In Monday’s post I mentioned how much I loved London when I visited – but London wasn’t always such an appealing place. During the Industrial Revolution, it was filthy and polluted. The stench was appalling, and an episode of particularly foul smells from the Thames River in 1858 was known as the “Great Stink.” Life […]
Environmental Health
Feeding the Hungry Cities: Backyard Chickens, Rooftop Gardens, and Vertical Farming
As I mentioned yesterday, Sharon Astyk of Casaubon’s Book and I are spending this week focusing on urbanization issues. Sharon is a farmer and has been writing for a long time about sustainable food production, particularly as it relates to climate change and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. In her post yesterday, she linked […]
A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked: Robin Fields at ProPublica: In Dialysis, Life-Saving Care at Great Risk and Cost Timothy Noah at Slate: McSurance on Trial: A Senate committee puts the spotlight on the crap health insurance given fast-food workers EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in the WSJ: The EPA Turns 40 Kristen Lombardi […]
Cancer
“It’s on our website”: an insufficient response to asbestos danger lurking in millons of attics
No doubt that a federal agency’s website can be a useful public relations tool. We all have much better access now to government data, reports and other records. That’s certainly a good thing. But even the most content-rich website cannot substitute for other forms of communication and information sharing. Yet more and more lately I’m […]
Our friend and APHA OHS colleague Mark Catlin has assembled on YouTube an amazing collection of more than 500 environmental health and safety film clips. The video collection contain footage dating back to the 1920’s, with loads WWII-era films produced by the U.S. military, Public Health Service and companies promoting tires, asbestos, oil, steel, tetraethyl […]
APHA Annual Meeting
Protecting health by eliminating hazards: New APHA policy statements take proactive approach to preventing illness and injury
by Elizabeth Grossman At this year’s American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting that took place in Denver November 7-11, the APHA’s Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety sections proposed new policy statements that recommend proactive strategies for preventing illness and injury by reducing exposure to hazardous chemicals and through design that promotes workplace safety. […]
Turkey Day is on the way. Workers employed in U.S. turkey processing plants are asking for your help to secure safer working conditions. These workers handle about 30 turkeys per minute—30 turkeys per minute—on the production line. The faster the production line moves, the faster the workers have to move to make their cuts. If […]
by Eileen Senn After decades of dysfunction, OSHA is poised to do something about their badly outdated rules for occupational exposures to chemical hazards. Millions of U.S. workers are exposed to chemicals every day at work, such as asbestos fibers in insulation, asphalt fumes in roofing and road work, carbon monoxide gas from burning fuels, […]
John Perlin has written an interesting Miller-McCune article about how the Pentagon has come to understand some of the problems associated with powering Iraq and Afghanistan operations – and how they’re now reducing operations’ energy consumption and embracing solar power. Perlin describes the experience of Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who assumed command of the coalition […]
It’s that time of year, when the Secretary of Labor is supposed to outline her rulemaking priorities for next 12 months. This would include new proposal to protect mine workers, like the 64 killed already this year, and the tens of thousands made ill by inadequate OSHA standards on exposure to chemicals. The Presidential Executive […]