May 19, 2008 The Pump Handle

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 […]

May 13, 2008 The Pump Handle

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 […]

May 13, 2008 The Pump Handle 1Comment

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 […]

May 12, 2008 The Pump Handle 2Comment

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 […]

May 1, 2008 The Pump Handle 1Comment

The Washington Post is running a series on the global food crisis, and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth a look.  In The New Economics of Hunger, Anthony Faiola explains how what started as an apparent blip in wheat prices has mushroomed into widespread hunger and unrest:

April 30, 2008 The Pump Handle

After so many stories about tainted drugs and food, here’s some good news for a change: The FDA plans to hire hundreds of new employees to help it fulfill its responsibilities to assure the safety of food, drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices. They’ve identified a critical need for “medical officers, consumer safety officers, chemists, nurse […]

April 15, 2008 The Pump Handle 3Comment

Most of us probably take our tap water for granted, but recent events remind us that we shouldn’t. Salmonella contamination of the water supply in Alamosa, Colorado sickened over 300 people and left residents avoiding showers and drinking bottled water for a week. Abel Pharmboy explains that the city was one of the few that didn’t […]

April 10, 2008 The Pump Handle 3Comment

Proposals for reforming our country’s dysfunctional healthcare system often emphasize that prevention can save us money, but the Washington Post’s David Brown cautions that it doesn’t always work out that way. He notes that some interventions, like uniform childhood immunization and colonoscopies for men ages 60-64, are clear financial winners, either because they don’t cost […]

April 9, 2008 The Pump Handle

Even though the Vanity Fair Green Issue features an excellent piece on Monsanto (which, in addition to its long history of toxic contamination, now has a reputation for ruthless legal campaigns against small farmers), we here at The Pump Handle were most excited to see this sentence on the book review page: In Doubt is […]

April 8, 2008 The Pump Handle 3Comment

Major public health organizations are drawing attention to climate change’s effects on health: the American Public Health Association has chosen “Climate Change: Our Health in the Balance” as the theme for National Public Health Week (April 7-13), and the World Health Organization used World Health Day (April 7th) to remind us that we’re already starting […]