With five days left in calendar year 2012, the Obama Administration released its current regulatory plan and agenda, including new rules addressing health and safety hazards in workplaces. Neither OSHA nor MSHA have a good track record predicting when such rules will actually be completed.
Public Health Practice
New study explores the healthy immigrant effect, casting doubt on the current school of thought
It’s often noted that immigrants to the United States experience a decline in health after adopting American lifestyle habits. However, a recent study has found that new immigrants might not be arriving in such good health after all.
Injury Control & Violence
Safety experiences of union carpenters, imagine what it’s like for the rest of them
A survey of more than 1,000 union carpenter apprentices describes how production pressure can compromise safety and how suffering an on-the-job injury can compromise your job security. The frank comments from workers who have the protection of a union makes me wonder how bad it must be for non-union workers.
Two recently published papers funded by the federal agency Health Canada report on excess risk of breast cancer among auto plastics workers and the chemical compounds and processes used that are the likely culprits.
Injury Control & Violence
First-of-its-kind survey compiles the experience of domestic workers, highlights the grim nature of an unregulated industry
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. But a new survey has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving their work environments.
“If you really look at how pain affects people and what it means to have pain…you start to view it more as a social phenomenon.” These are words from Dr. Daniel Carr, who says the time for a population-based approach doesn’t begin with misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers; it begins, in fact, with how we interpret the contributors to pain in the first place.
Drug Safety
Public health takes on the opioid abuse and overdose problem, building on strengths as conveners, educators
A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the patients at Cincinnati’s Center for Chemical Addictions Treatment were admitted for opioid addiction and abuse. During the treatment center’s last fiscal year, that number was up to 64 percent. The numbers reflect a startling trend in Ohio and throughout the nation — a trend that public health workers are taking to task.
A new study finds that one-third of the subjects whose diabetes went into remission following gastric bypass surgery developed the disease again within five years.
Most current strategies to address the obesity problem in Americans focus on individuals changing their behavior. A new report illuminates why those strategies alone ignore the work environment as a contributor to obesity risk.
Public Health Science
Classic papers in Public Health: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for the Year 1947 by E.R.A. Merewether
A study and report by ERA Merewether in the 1940s alerted the medical community to the role of occupational asbestos exposure in lung disease.