Producers and users of styrene and formaldehyde can’t handle the truth about those compounds’ carcinogenicity, and use their friends in Congress to punish the messenger.
In the final section of our new report “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we end on a high note. We profile a number of new laws at the state and local levels to improve working conditions for Americans and protect them from serious health and safety hazards.
In our new report “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we devote one section to key activities by the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress.
During the last seven Presidential election years, OSHA has an interesting record of issuing new rules on worker safety issues despite the heated national campaigns.
Injury Control & Violence
No shortage of ideas from OSHA staff to improve oversight of agency’s Voluntary Protection Program
An internal OSHA report on the agency’s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) was submitted to agency leadership nine months ago, and released to the public this week. The group made 34 recommendations to improve the program, including several addressing fatalities occurring at VPP sites.
Injury Control & Violence
Worker falls 70+ feet to his death at ConAgra mill, another at a Pepisco plant, manlifts involved in both cases
Three multi-national corporations. Three workers dead from manlift incidents. Preventing more deaths from manlifts requires comprehensive fatality investigations.
President Obama offered high praise to his regulatory czar on the day Mr. Cass Sunstein announced his resignation. It’s disappointing neither are bold enough to address the grave limits of cost-benefit analysis.
Child Labor
Congress and White House decided to turn their back, but child labor on U.S. farms hasn’t disappeared
The NBC News affiliate in California’s Bay Area released last week a multi-part investigative series entitled “Children in the field: American kids pick your food.” Congress and the White House embrace the fiction of family farms, but children working on farms tell a different story.
Here’s an important public health fact: women with dense breast tissue are at least four times more likely to develop breast cancer. I wish I’d known about that risk factor before learning last month that I have Stage IIIB breast cancer.
Reform of the medical malpractice system is frequently mentioned as a way to control U.S. health care costs. A study of health care spending following a cap on damage awards in Texas shows no effect on spending levels or trends.