At a recent Senate hearing, former OSHA Assistant Secretary Jerry Scannell (1989-1993) described the pressure he often felt, especially from lawyers inside and outside the agency, to settle inspection and fatality-investigation cases by using âdiscount factorsâ to reduce monetary penalties. He recalled wondering, âWhat are we, a discount house?â  Reporter Andy Pierrotti with WSPA-TV (Spartanburg/Greenville, SC) has found exactly the […]
Nathan Dove, an underground coal miner, was electrocuted on Friday night at Massey Energy’s Aracoma/Alma mine in Melville, Logan County, WV. Mr. Dove was 24 years old. This is the same mine which was given a safety award by MSHA about a month ago (see “Safety Awards Gone Bad” ) and in January 2006, was the place […]
A fair number of people have “Ah-ha!” moments, but how many actually take those nuggets of brilliance and pursue them? One man –an inventor of sorts who I came to know because of the Sago disaster—has done just that. While watching the rescue efforts at the WV Sago mine unfold on television in early January 2006, this man used […]
What’s new at the FDA? Ed Silverman at Pharmalot reports on FDA plans to spend some of its user-fee money on post-marketing safety activities. Merrill Goozner at GoozNews warns that the FDA is scrapping the Helsinki Declaration on protecting human subjects. Jacob Goldstein at WSJ’s Health Blog wonders whether pharmaceutical groups’ proposals to pay user […]
After dinner last night at a local tavern, I asked the waiter for a container to carry home our leftovers.  He promptly returned with a No. 5 plastic container (damn!).  Have you ever looked at the carry-out containers you receive from your local restaurants?  Are they made of a recyclable material? Are they made of a recyclable material that the city you live in will actually recycle?Â
by David Egilman, MD, MPH I just finished watching the Waxman hearings on FDA preemption and must comment on Christopher Shays’ (R-CT) comments. Christopher Shays is the last remaining Republican congressman from New England. Hopefully the November elections will result in the extinction of this last remaining remnant of the age of the dinosaurs. He […]
For the Christian Science Monitor, Marilyn Gardner writes about pregnant women who stay on the job until the day their babies are due (or even until the minute they go into labor) and start working again soon after their babies’ births, because they’re unable to take more time off. The Family Medical Leave Act allows […]
An op-ed in the Baltimore Sun introduced me to a new use for the term “Iron Triangle,” this one pertains industries and organizations involved in food aid. In “It’s Time to Stop a Tragic Waste,” David Kohn writes how hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. food aid is squandered on subsidies to “corporate agribusinesses, shipping companies […]
In the final leg of a long and costly lawsuit against the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), U.S. district judge Hugh Lawson ruled in favor of ACGIH, dismissing claims by the National Mining Association and others* that the non-profit, scientific organization violated Georgia’s Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (A complete case study on this matter […]
A few days ago, researchers at West Virginia School of Medicine who are involved in the C8 Health Project provided some initial results from the 69,030 participants who live in the vicinity of DuPont’s Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, WV. The information was presented at a May 7 public lecture entitled “The C8 Health Project: How a Class Action […]