regulation
sb admin | January 17, 2007By David Michaels
Later today, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board will hold a public meeting to consider issuing an Emergency Temporary Standard to protect workers exposed to the chemical diacetyl. This chemical, a primary component of artificial butter flavor, has been implicated as a cause of bronchiolitis obliterans, a debilitating and sometimes fatal lung disease.
Yesterday, on behalf of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP), I sent the Standards Board new evidence: an unpublished Dutch study reporting three cases of the rare lung…
sb admin | January 15, 2007By David Michaels
The outbreak of severe lung disease caused by exposure to diacetyl, the chemical that makes food taste like artificial butter flavor, is growing. According to the California Department of Health Services, there are now eight known cases of severe obstructive lung disease among workers exposed to diacetyl, with three more reported cases under investigation.
How many cases are occurring in other states? No one knows, because California is the only state in the country that is actively collecting information. Whatâs striking about the California cases is that none of the…
sb admin | January 12, 2007Thanks to those of you who have responded so far to the draft paper, âGetting Home Safe and Sound? OSHA at Thirty Five,â which was posted here several days ago. Many people have agreed with the need for this dialogue and indicated the intent to contribute to it. Comments so far have supported the need for a generic safety and health program rule; raised cautions about whatâs said in a public forum; urged stricter penalties when employers negligently violate OSHA rules; expressed the need to de-politicize OSHA; endorsed the idea of third party inspections and proposed examining the SEC…
sb admin | January 12, 2007By David Michaels
âRisk assessment data can be like a captured spy: if you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know.â
- William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Administrator,
Risk assessment, explicit and implicit, is the motor that drives regulation. It can be a valuable tool for assisting regulatory agencies in selecting priorities and setting standards. It is also a means through which opponents of regulation can manufacture uncertainty and impede implementation of appropriate public health and environmental protection programs.
The failed White House proposal to…
sb admin | January 11, 2007by Robert ShullÂ
With the Bush administrationâs war on science raging all around us, itâs nice to be able to report a win for the public.
In January 2006, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a draft bulletin proposing to impose one-size-fits-all criteria for all agency risk assessments â and a good deal of other scientific and technical evaluations that arenât considered risk assessments. OIRAâs bulletin was expected to be the swansong of then-OIRA administrator John Graham, who had long advocated manipulations and…
sb admin | January 11, 2007By David Michaels
In todayâs Wall Street Journal (sub required), Jeffrey Ball reports that ExxonMobil has decided to stop funding several of the groups that have been in the forefront of attacking the scientific evidence on global warming.
The campaign to shame ExxonMobil appears to be working. Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a damning report describing how the oil giant funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science:
In an effort to deceive the public about the…
sb admin | December 22, 2006By David Michaels
In July, two unions, backed by a group of scientists, petitioned both federal OSHA and California OSHA to issue rules to protect workers from diacetyl, the chemical implicated in dozens of cases of lung disease in the food industry (See our earlier post âArtificial Butter Flavor is (Still) Killing Workersâ).
Federal OSHA continues to do nothing. Earlier this month, a group of us met with several high level OSHA officials, who told us that the agency was still considering our petition. In other words, no action planned.
California, however, is moving forward.
The…
sb admin | December 11, 2006by PotomacFeverishÂ
In the first of what may be numerous resignations, Scott Gottlieb, MD has announced that he will leave his post as Deputy Commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration. He has been at the center of the political science practiced at the FDA as noted by Time last year:
Nowhere in the federal bureaucracy is it more important to insulate government experts from the influences of politics and special interests than at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with assuring the safety of everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and…
sb admin | December 11, 2006By David Michaels
This morningâs AP wire brings news of yet another E. Coli outbreak, this one resulting in 14 hospitalizations (so far) among customers of a âTaco Johnâsâ restaurant in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
This follows the Taco Bell E. Coli outbreak, with more than 60 cases in 5 states.
Which followed the spinach E. Coli outbreak that sickened 200 people.
The FDA may be doing a terrific job investigating each of these outbreaks, but has failed in its primary mission: to prevent the outbreaks in the first place. The FDA is suffering from the effects of being part of a government that no longer…
sb admin | December 8, 2006Health and environmental bloggers have covered a wide array of topics this week. Some highlights:
Steve at Omni Brain (don't click the link while eating) displays graphic warnings from Belgian and Thai cigarette packs
Merrill Goozner at GoonzNews posts an excerpt from his just-published article (cover story of The Scientist, for those with subscriptions) on treating malaria on the Thai-Burmese border.
Revere at Effect Measure challenged those who inveigh against alternative medicine to respond to a study that found chicken soup to inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis, and a lively discussion ensued…
sb admin | December 7, 2006Earlier this year, President Bush nominated Susan E. Dudley of the Mercatus Center to replace John Graham, PhD, as the head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The office oversees all of the Administrationâs regulatory policies, including public health and environmental rules, and is often the last major hurdle faced by agencies like OSHA or EPA before a new regulation can be proposed. As Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) noted at Ms. Dudleyâs November 13 confirmation hearing, OIRA lacks name recognition among the public, but its work has tremendous âimpact on the lives of all…
sb admin | December 7, 2006By David Michaels
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal published last December (by Peter Waldman, 12/23/05), product defense experts at ChemRisk pulled off a particularly audacious scam on behalf of Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility that was being sued for contaminating drinking water with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.
ChemRiskâs scientists went to China to obtain the raw data of a 1987 study that had implicated chromium-polluted water in high cancer rates, paying the lead author $2,000, re-analyzing his data, changing the results to exonerate chromium and…
sb admin | December 5, 2006By David Michaels
In my post Monday, I wrote that breathing diacetyl, the chemical in artificial butter flavor, is killing and crippling workers around the country. It is now more than six years since the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was first notified that workers in a popcorn plant in Missouri had developed the terrible and sometimes fatal lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans.
In response, the agency did send an inspector to the facility, but OSHA's Area Director concluded that OSHA could not issue a citation since the agency had no standards on the chemicals in…
sb admin | December 4, 2006By David Michaels
Every year, Marion Ohio (nickname: âpopcorn capital of the worldâ) hosts the largest popcorn festival in the world, with 250,000 attendees. The Orville Redenbacher Parade is one of the festivalsâ highlights. Redenbacher, who developed the hybrid corn strain that pops so uniformly, was actually from Indiana, but ConAgra Foods manufactures the best selling microwave popcorn brand âOrville Redenbacherâsâ (along with Act II brand) at its factory in Marion.
Americans like their popcorn to taste like it has butter on it. So workers at the Marion plant apply a mix of chemicals that…
sb admin | December 1, 2006by OSHAL
It is worthwhile reading the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (report PDF here; Jordan Barabâs take here) that recommends a review of the effectiveness of current strategies for workplace safety and health. Of particular interest to me is the attitude and direction of this Administrationâs OSHA, in particular for those workplaces with the dirtiest jobs, where the lowest wages prevail, where many do not speak English, and where there is no union to defend their rights or speak for them.
Where are these âforgotten workersâ? They are in meatpacking and poultry plants, at…
sb admin | December 1, 2006by Susan F. WoodÂ
After the recent post here on KETEK, both the Wall Street Journal and Senator Grassley are on the move. The WSJ reports today on another antibiotic Cubicin which has been seeking approval for use in endocarditis and discusses the competing issues of data quality and high standards, with the push for more antibiotics, particularly in the case of serious infections without effective treatment. The case of Cubicin in some respects serves as an example of this, however Ketek does not. They both illustrate problems identified by the recent Institute of Medicine Report on…
sb admin | November 30, 2006 by Susan F. Wood
Much has been written about the antibiotic drug, telithromycin, otherwise known as Ketek. It seems to combine a host of concerns all in one place (see also Matthews, AW, WSJ, May 19, 2006:B1). Critically, concerns about safety, from visual effects to fatal liver toxicity, are paired with questions about lack of relative efficacy. These very basic concerns are then confounded with problems in particular safety studies that were carried out fraudulently and the faulty data derived from it provided to the FDA. But FDA leadership/management apparently discounted these problems…
sb admin | November 30, 2006By David Michaels
In a move that recognizes the post-election climate change in Washington, the EPA has told two Democratic Senators that it is revising plans to roll-back the reporting requirements of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). In a post yesterday, I wrote about TRI as an important (and cost-effective) example of "Regulation by Shaming" or "Democracy by Disclosure."
Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post obtained the letter EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson sent to New Jersey Democratic senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez in which he announced his plans. According to…
sb admin | November 29, 2006By David Michaels
Last week, public scorn forced Rupert Murdock, powerful chief executive of the News Corp, to cancel âIf I Did It,â OJ Simpsonâs book and Fox TV tie-in. While shaming has fallen out of favor in the field of criminal justice, the heaping of public scorn and anger - dating back to putting criminals in public stocks and labeling adulterers with a scarlet letter -- has long been recognized as a deterrent to unacceptable behavior
Shaming works on corporations as well as individuals. As a mechanism for restricting undesirable behavior, or promoting desirable behavior, shaming is…
sb admin | November 28, 2006By David Michaels
Meat factories continue to be among the most dangerous places to work in America. According to a devastating article in the Dallas Morning News, âthousands of illegal immigrants gravitate toward meatpacking plants in places like Cactus, Texasâ where each year more than one out of every ten workers gets injured carving meat on fast moving conveyer belts. The line speed requires exhausted workers wielding the sharpest of knives or hooks to make hundred of cuts an hour. OSHA inspectors are rarely seen in these factories.
One worker at the Swift & Co's Cactus, Texas plant…