Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky. But a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health used two analytic strategies to address such criticism.
Seven new worker safety regulations–both proposed and final rules—are stuck in the Obama White House. One proposed rule has been “under review” for 645 days.
In an address to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill attempted to codify the criteria for determining disease causality. An occupational physician, Hill was primarily concerned with the relationships among sickness, injury, and the conditions of work.
Since 2000, overdose deaths due to prescription painkillers in Utah have increased by more than 400 percent. By 2006, more Utahans were losing their lives to prescription drug overdoses than to motor vehicle crashes. For Dr. Lynn Webster, a longtime pain management physician, the startling numbers were a call to action.
It took six years of going from doctor to doctor to doctor for Penney Cowan to finally receive a diagnosis for her chronic pain: fibromyalgia. Doctors had told her she’d just have to learn to live with the pain — a condition that some days made it hard to lift a cup of coffee. So when she decided to join the pain program at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, she didn’t have high hopes. She says she expected the effort to fail.
Now that the Presidential election is over, it’s time for the Labor Department to kick into high gear expand workers’ rights and ensuring workers’ lives and health are protected. Here’s my wish list of tasks for the Labor Department to accomplish in the next 6 months:
APHA Annual Meeting
Public health association adopts new policies opposing military recruiting in schools, supporting taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages
At last week’s American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting its Governing Council adopted about a dozen new policies to guide the Association’s advocacy activities.
Cancer
Public Health Classics: Assessing air pollution and health in six U.S. cities, researchers’ findings changed the air we breathe
In the 1974, most of us thought that air pollution was something that just looked and smelled bad. But public health researchers had just launched a study to determine whether air pollution shortened people’s lives. Twenty years later they published their results. It forever changed the way we think about and address air pollutants.
The American Public Health Association’s annual meeting is taking place this week in San Francisco, with the theme of “Prevention and Wellness Across the Life Span.”
Environmental Health
Public Health Classics: Collecting children’s baby teeth to identify lead poisoning
The baby teeth of children collected by their teachers, allowed Dr. Herb Needleman to make the link between lead poisoning and lower IQ scores.