government
kkrisberg | May 23, 2017Last 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.
“Sexual and gender minorities make up between 2 and 6 percent of the population, however sexual orientation and gender identity are rarely asked about in health studies and they’re not included in fundamental metrics like the Census,” said Juno Obedin-Maliver, one…
kkrisberg | May 18, 2017A 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.
“One of the troubling things last year was that (Zika funding) was viewed as a cost — every week, there was another delay and more people becoming infected and more chances of birth defects,” study co-author Bruce Y. Lee, an associate professor at…
kkrisberg | May 16, 2017At BuzzFeed, Kate Moore tells the story of the “radium girls,” the hundreds of women during WWI who worked painting watch dials with luminous radium paint — a substance that would eventually poison and kill them even though they were told it was perfectly safe. What followed was years of employers covering up and denying evidence that radium was killing workers, while berating the women for attempting to get help with their mounting medical bills.
Eventually, Moore writes, their fight for justice led to one of the first cases in which an employer was held responsible for the health of workers…
kkrisberg | May 5, 2017Right now, according to public health officials, about half a million U.S. kids have blood lead levels that could harm their health. However, new research finds many more children — hundreds of thousands more — are likely going unidentified.
In a study published last week in Pediatrics, researchers estimated that while 1.2 million cases of elevated blood lead levels (EBLL) likely occurred between 1999 and 2010, only 607,000 were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That data gap not only means kids are likely going without needed treatment and services, but that public…
kkrisberg | May 2, 2017At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who often end up working in the kind of dangerous and abusive conditions that few Americans would put up with.
Grabell chronicles the history of Case Farms and how it first began recruiting refugees from Guatemala who were fleeing a brutal civil war in…
kkrisberg | May 1, 2017Protecting babies and children against dangerous — sometimes fatal — diseases is a core mission of public health. Everyday, in health departments across the nation, someone is working on maintaining and improving childhood vaccination rates and keeping diseases like measles and mumps from regaining a foothold in the U.S.
Fortunately for us, public health has been so successful that it’s easy to forget what it was like just a few decades ago when measles was a common childhood illness. (Though here’s a reminder.) But sustaining vaccination rates that provide population-wide protection against…
kkrisberg | April 25, 2017More than 8 million U.S. children depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program for access to timely medical care. The program is authorized through 2019, but its federal funding expires in September and it’s unclear what Congress will do.
That uncertainty stresses all the systems and families that depend on CHIP, but it may be especially risky for the 2 million chronically ill children who get care through the program, which was originally designed for families falling in the gap between market affordability and Medicaid eligibility. In a study published this month in Health Affairs,…
kkrisberg | April 21, 2017There was always an assumption that the Affordable Care Act would need time to find its sea legs. That’s why it included measures to shield insurers from the potential profit losses that inherently come with offering millions more people better health coverage at more reasonable prices. Insurers operate on profit margins and the ACA took that into account, for better or for worse.
But it’s still been a rocky road for insurers. (Insert argument here for single-payer health care, but that’s a different story.) On the patient side, with 20 million more Americans insured and growing accounts of…
cmonforton | April 19, 2017A new commentary by CUNY School of Public Health professor Franklin Mirer is timed perfectly for this weekend's Marches for Science.
Mirer writes about the ongoing interference by Members of Congress on the science behind the designation of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. His commentary, "What’s Science Got to Do with It?" appears in the current issue of April issue of the Synergist, a membership publication of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
Mirer's example concerns a rule published by EPA in December 2016 on testing formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products (e.g.,…
kkrisberg | April 14, 2017Public health is in trouble.
Last month, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. It was more of an outline, really, and didn’t provide many details, but it did call for a nearly 18 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for block granting the budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, the White House supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. That repeal would also eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which now accounts for about 12 percent of CDC’s budget and funds critical public health…
kkrisberg | April 12, 2017To get a clearer sense of just how bad our drug overdose problem has gotten, look no further than this year’s County Health Rankings. The annual report found that after years of declining premature deaths, that rate is on the rise and due primarily to overdose deaths. It means we could be seeing the first generation of American kids with shorter life expectancies than their parents.
“We often think of the opioid crisis either as happening in very rural communities or as an urban issue,” Kate Konkle, Action Center Team director for County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, told me. “But this is…
kkrisberg | April 8, 2017At the Center for Public Integrity, Talia Buford and Maryam Jameel investigate federal contractors that receive billions in public funds despite committing wage violations against their workers. In analyzing Department of Labor data on more than 1,100 egregious violators, the reporters found that federal agencies modified or granted contracts totaling $18 billion to 68 contractors with proven wage violations. The Department of Defense contracted with the most wage violators.
Under Obama, labor officials had attempted to address the problem with the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which…
cmonforton | March 22, 2017My favorite line from today’s Senate hearing on the nomination of Alex Acosta to be Labor Secretary came from Senator Elizabeth Warren:
“The test for Secretary of Labor is not: are you better than Andrew Puzder.”
Puzder was Trump’s first pick for the job. He had a long list of problems that made him unfit for the position. So instead of Puzder, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is considering the nomination of Alex Acosta. The 48-year old is currently dean of the College of Law at Florida International University. He also served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern…
kkrisberg | March 21, 2017At the Sacramento Bee, Ryan Lillis and Jose Luis Villegas report on the effects that Trump’s immigration crackdown is having on California farms, writing that fear of deportation is spreading throughout the state’s farming communities. While many farmworkers believe immigration raids are inevitable, farm operators, many who voted for Trump, hope the president will bring more water to the region and keep immigration officials off their fields. Lillis and Villegas write:
Fear is everywhere. The night before, the local school board became one of the first in California to declare its campuses a…
kkrisberg | March 17, 2017There’s a lot at stake for women’s health in the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, which eliminated out-of-pocket costs for birth control and has been highly successful in breaking down barriers to affordable family planning. The cost-sharing changes alone are saving individual women hundreds of dollars each year on their choice of contraception.
So far, the Republican replacement proposal, known as the American Health Care Act, doesn’t impact the Obama-era contraception coverage provisions, nor does it touch other women’s health benefits, such as designating maternity care…
cmonforton | March 16, 2017Labor Secretary nominee Alex Acosta is schedule to appear next week before a Senate Committee for his confirmation hearing. Senators should formulate their questions for him by reviewing a just released platform on worker safety. Protecting Workers' Lives & Limbs: An Agenda for Action makes dozens of recommendations to improve occupational health and safety policies and practices, including many for the future Labor Secretary. They include:
Commit to protecting workers’ health and safety on the job with strong and fair enforcement, promulgation of common sense standards, and outreach and…
kkrisberg | March 15, 2017As the Republicans push forward their abysmal Affordable Care Act replacement, much of the talk surrounding its impact focuses on insurance numbers and premium hikes. Those things are certainly important. But this is more important: The Republican plan will cause unnecessary suffering and preventable death.
How do we know this? Let’s start with the Congressional Budget Office report that scored the Republican replacement plan, titled the American Health Care Act. That report estimates that if the Republican plan is enacted, 14 million more people would be uninsured by 2018 than would have…
cmonforton | March 14, 2017Kentucky’s Labor Secretary Derrick Ramsey announced this week that his department would be issuing a “Monthly Workplace Safety Report.” The report will provide a recap of the previous month’s safety consultation services, which are offered to employers at no charge by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety & Health Education & Training.
The Labor Secretary says he wants to change the public's perceptions about the Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s work.
“For years, employers across Kentucky viewed the issuance of penalties and citations as the cornerstone of the…
cmonforton | March 11, 2017Rick Simer’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see OSHA’s findings in the agency’s recent citations against K.B.P. Coil Coaters, Inc.
The 64 year-old was working in August 2016 when he was killed on the job. The initial press report by the Denver Post indicated that Mr. Simer was “caught in an aluminum splitter machine.” I wrote about the incident shortly after it occurred.
OSHA completed its post-fatality inspection and recently issued citations to K.B.P. Coil Coaters. OSHA found that the company violated safety regulations for lockout/tagout procedures (1910.147)…
kkrisberg | March 10, 2017Another day, another study that shows soda taxes work to reduce the consumption of beverages associated with costly chronic diseases in children and adults.
This time it’s a study on Mexico’s sugar-sweetened beverage tax, which went into effect at the start of 2014 and tacked on 1 peso per liter of sugary drink. Published this month in the journal Health Affairs, the study found that purchases of sugary drinks subject to the new tax went down more than 5 percent in 2014 and nearly 10 percent in 2015. At the same time, purchases of untaxed drinks went up by slightly more than 2 percent. The…