The turkey pardoned by the President was headed for a slaughterhouse with a history of food safety violations such as fecal contamination. Surprisingly, the USDA considers it a model for a modernized, streamlined inspection system.
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.
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.
Monica Thayer, 25, nearly lost her life when she was pulled hair-first into a machine at JR Engineering. She lost her scalp and spent three weeks in the hospital. Her employer doesn’t think it is responsible and is challenging OSHA’s $7,000 penalty.
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:
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.
At Palm Beach Groves in Lantana, Fla., a small, seasonal business that ships fresh citrus nationwide, employees have regularly voted between getting a raise or keeping their employer-based health insurance. Health coverage always wins, as many employees’ ages and pre-existing conditions would have made it nearly impossible to get coverage on their own. But a new report finds the Affordable Care Act is on target to help prevent this scenario.
Several workers were injured when a January explosion rocked El Dorado Drilling’s Logan Rig #7 in Logan County, Oklahoma. The company said “these things happen,” but accident investigators know otherwise.
Researchers studying workers’ compensation claims have found that almost one in 12 injured workers who begin using opioids were still using the prescription drugs three to six months later. It’s a trend that, not surprisingly, can lead to addiction, increased disability and more work loss – but few doctors are acting to prevent it.