It shouldn’t be long now before Labor Secretary Hilda Solis releases her semi-annual regulatory plan for new worker health and safety rules. This document is required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order 12866, and is supposed to be published every April and October. The Labor Secretary’s most recent regulatory agenda wasn’t issued until […]
Injury Control & Violence
Safety blitz at WV Massey Energy mine, 20 instances of aggravated misconduct
The Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Adminstration (MSHA) issued a news release yesterday reporting on the results of an inspection at Inman Energy’s Randolph coal mine, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. MSHA chief Joe Main said: “the conduct and behavior exhibited when we caught the mine operator by surprise is nothing short of outrageous. […]
Tobacco use is one of the top risk factors for the non-communicable diseases the World Health Organization is targeting, and WHO has already done a lot of anti-smoking work over the past few years. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control entered into force in 2005, and its core demands include both price and non-price […]
Last week in Moscow, the World Health Organization and Russian Federation held the First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Noncommunicable Disease Control, which addressed the “slow-motion catastrophe” of rising rates of non-communicable illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan warned that diabetes rates have skyrocketed in both rich and poor […]
A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked: Ken Ward Jr. at Sustained Outrage: Protecting workers: Progress under Obama? (Also see his related Coal Tattoo piece on mine safety in the Obama administration) Maryn McKenna at Superbug: What vaccine refusal really costs: Measles in Arizona Body Horrors: Blood Money: Hookworm Economics in the Postbellum South […]
“Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living” was the rallying cry of community organizer Mother Jones (a.k.a. Mary Harris Jones, 1837-1930) to fire up workers as they demanded better working conditions and labor rights. The motto still resonates today, especially this week when workers, human rights, and public health advocates commemorate International […]
Last week, Andrew Sullivan noted that a large proportion of healthcare costs are for the last days and hours of patients’ lives and made the following proposal: If everyone aged 40 or over simply made sure we appointed someone to be our power-of-attorney and instructed that person not to prolong our lives by extraordinary measures […]
Those who work to prevent death, disease, and disasters often have a thankless task – if they do their jobs well, people rarely notice. But two OSHA inspectors recently saved workers’ lives in a very visible way, and the agency wrote about it on their blog, (Work in Progress). Trench collapses are an all-too-common occurrence, […]
Earlier this month, Yale University student Michele Dufault was killed by lathe equipment at the school’s chemistry lab. It appears that she was working alone late at night and her hair got tangled in the machine. Richard Van Noorden of Nature News puts the tragedy in context: Around the United States, laboratory directors and safety […]
Today is World Malaria Day, and the World Health Organization reminds us that each year the world sees approximately 250 million malaria cases and nearly 800,000 deaths from the disease. In 2009, half of the world’s population were at risk of malaria. The disease is present in 106 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and […]