OxyChem imports about 300,000 pounds of asbestos annually. Health groups allege the company failed to report to EPA their significant use of asbestos.
Affordable Care Act
Zika remains a serious threat. Federal funding cuts will make the problem even worse.
Last year’s emergency Zika funding is about to run out and there’s no new money in the pipeline. It’s emblematic of the kind of short-term, reactive policymaking that public health officials have been warning us about for years. Now, as we head into summer, public health again faces a dangerous, highly complex threat along with an enormous funding gap.
Affordable Care Act
Trump’s budget is a disaster for public health: ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’
When you ask public health advocates about President Trump’s recent budget proposal, you typically get a bewildered pause. Public health people don’t like to exaggerate — they follow the science, they stay calm, they face off against dangerous threats on a regular basis. Exaggerating doesn’t help contain diseases, it only makes it harder. So it’s concerning when you hear words like this about Trump’s budget: “devastating,” “not serious,” “ludicrous,” “unfathomable.”
Add this to the list of absurdities from the Trump Administration: the Justice Department (DOJ) is arguing that the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers (USW) should rely on the Trump’s DOJ to defend an Obama-era OSHA regulation.
Congressional lawmakers propose protections for undocumented farmworkers; the Trump administration takes aim at workplace civil rights enforcement; federal legislation would provide benefits for gig economy workers; and poultry workers get nearly $600,000 in back wages.
Affordable Care Act
More research that defunding Planned Parenthood simply leaves women without needed health care
To the surprise of literally no one, President Trump’s 2018 budget proposed stripping all federal funds, including Medicaid dollars, from Planned Parenthood. Proponents of this argue that if Planned Parenthood clinics end up shuttered, women can simply access care elsewhere. But growing research shows that’s the opposite of what actually happens.
Food Safety & Nutrition
Georgia congressman resurrects bad idea, poultry workers threatened with faster line speeds
A Georgia congressman thinks poultry plants should be able to increase line speeds to 175 birds per minute. That was a bad idea from Obama’s USDA. It was nixed, but now it’s resurrected.
Environmental Health
The PRIDE Study is open for enrollment: People are ‘hungry to be heard and represented’
Last week, researchers officially opened enrollment in the nation’s first decades-long study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer health — an effort they hope will transform our understanding of the health challenges LGBTQ people face and begin narrowing a giant data gap on their physical, mental and social well-being.
Environmental justice and labor groups in California were relentless in their demand to make refineries safer. Their years of effort paid off with an announcement last week by the state of new refinery safety regulations.
A Zika attack rate of just 1 percent across the six states most at risk for the mosquito-borne disease could result in $1.2 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, a new study finds. That’s more than the $1.1 billion in emergency Zika funding that Congress approved last year after months of delay and which is expected to run out this summer.