At a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, meat and poultry workers told of crippling injuries, and a grieving mother asked officials to prevent more workers from suffering a fate like her son’s.
When President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act into law in 2011, it was described as the most sweeping reform of the nation’s food safety laws in nearly a century. Public health advocates hailed the law for shifting regulatory authority from reaction to prevention. What received less attention was a first-of-its-kind provision that protects workers who expose food safety lawbreakers.
The Obama Administration still has time to abandon its ill-conceived new regulation on poultry inspection. We’ll see if the Administration decides to treat poultry workers better than the firms that employ them.
In a first-of-its-kind study, a researcher has estimated that the health-related economic savings of removing bisphenol A from our food supply is a whopping $1.74 billion annually. And that’s a conservative estimate.
The wisdom of USDA’s plan to privatize poultry inspection is striking newspaper editors as an unwise move. USDA is rebutting the opinion pieces, but their assertions need a dose of reality.
It’s bad enough having President Obama and his USDA pushing a new poultry inspection process that will injure workers. Now we have seven Democratic Senators who are also eager to screw the workers.
On average, eating healthy costs about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy diets, according to a new study. The extra cost seems insignificant at first — a small cup of coffee often costs more — but it all adds up to be a considerable barrier for many low-income families.
There are few factors that shape a person’s health as strongly and predictably as income. And while enforcing wage and labor laws may at first seem outside the purview of public health agencies, Rajiv Bhatia adamantly disagrees. In fact, he says that public health may wield the most persuasive stick in town.
A recently published study demonstrates (again) the serious risk to workers’ health when exposed to common food-flavoring agents. The risk has been known for more than a decade. It’s just another example of our ineffective systems for protecting workers, consumers and the environment from chemical hazards.
As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday and the White House gets ready for President Obama to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday November 27 that will “reflect upon the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving,” let us take a moment to reflect upon the welfare of the men and women […]