Fatality: cage washer

I've never seen a walk-in version of these. This is - like just about any other occupational cause - a gruesome way to die. The story isn't new; it was brought up in my law course discussing torts. In short, a worker became trapped in a cage washer (like a giant dishwasher for animal cages) and was fatally scalded. Steam burns are horrid, horrid things. Minnesota's Dept. Labor states: "Because there's a fatality here that caused or contributed to, there's a non-negotiable penalty of $25,000 per penalty." The article cited an average of 72 occupational deaths per year in Minnesota. Details of the inspections were not made public, but each [Minnesota] OSHA citation pointed to a specific safety rule involving equipment safety: ...employees must be able to open an exit route door from the inside at all times without special knowledge or tools ... the guarding device... shall be designed and constructed as to prevent the operator from placing any part of his body in danger zone during the operation cycle. ... each machine shall be equipped so it is possible for the operator to cut off the power without leaving the position at the point of operation. I'm not clear on how that would have mitigated this specific incident. The hospital planed to contest the findings and the fines. How is it possible that fines be "non-negotiable" and yet "contestable"? My understanding has always been that 'contesting' fines generally means "pleading them to a lower amount". .

[resource] Topics in German

From the Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizine (BAuA) - Topics from A to Z. This is the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, like our NIOSH. There's a version in English. .

Pilgrimage & Polio

Saudi Arabia: Pilgrims Who Travel to Mecca This Fall Will Get an Oral Polio Vaccine on Arrival By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: September 28, 2009 New York Times Saudi Arabia has announced that everyone arriving for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in November will have to swallow a dose of oral polio vaccine under the eyes of health officials. The kingdom has become more and more aggressive in its fight against polio, which has hovered on the brink of eradication for years. Until recently, the Saudi authorities asked for proof of vaccination when pilgrims applied for visas and forcibly vaccinated only those arriving from countries where polio was endemic. In New York last week, the country’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, and Ted Turner, the cable television billionaire and chairman of the United Nations Foundation, announced that Saudi Arabia would donate $30 million toward global polio eradication. While that is only a small contribution to the $6.1 billion spent over the last 20 years, it is symbolically important. Polio is endemic in only four countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and regions of Nigeria and India with a Muslim majority. It persists largely because of a persistent rumor that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Each year, travelers from endemic countries seed outbreaks in other poor countries, where vaccination drives had been dropped when the disease was thought to have been eliminated. In some years, it has reached Saudi Arabia, where millions of pilgrims live close together in tent cities for the holy week.

Xcel & others prosecuted

People say the strangest things: It was just an accident. Xcel Energy is being prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department (upon the request of OSHA) for the deaths of 5 people a couple years ago. More interesting to me is that individual people are being prosecuted as well, not just the corporation. Two people from the sub-contractor doing the work. The original story from 2007 in the NY Times has a nice photo showing the exterior of the worksite. Minneapolis-based Xcel issued a statement Friday that said the fire was an accident, not a criminal act. Do these people actually think the two are mutually contradictory? Well, I guess they do. Or at least, they want you to. ... occurred during the renovation of a large empty metal pipe down which water normally flowed to create hydroelectric power. Five employees of RPI Coating were trapped in the pipe when chemicals being used in the renovation caught fire and blocked their only exit. well, since Xcel is here and the fatalities were there, the Denver paper has a better article. workers were in a drained water tunnel, known as a penstock, connected to the plant, cleaning a sprayer with a flammable solvent. Vapor from the solvent ignited, causing the fire ... There is a link at the bottom of this article to a .pdf copy of the Federal Indictment. I suppose there should be a standard disclaimer: this is my personal opinion, blah blah, based upon information available at the time blah blah.

environmental clean up

Clean up of PFCs in Woodbury starts next week. .

Just gross

Photographs of the 'shroom infestation in the yard. Two close-ups for ID. One wider-angle to see extent of problem. Fungi gross me out. Ever since I saw a photo of an aspergillis infection on someone's leg ... eww... Of course, it was one of those high-quality, high-resolution medical photographs. I was very glad the lecture was just before lunch. I spent half an hour last week trying not to puke simply from the psychological effort of picking them. The top photograph is the yard after being left for 3 days without eradication. This is posted for the benefit of the Extension Officer I contacted for assistance. If anyone else, however, has suggestions short of a nuclear device, please let me know.

[resource] NIOSH science blog

NIOSH has a science blog here. Finally a blog that has intelligent comments. Well, compared to the drivel I find on my local newspaper after something "scientific". An interesting collection of different topics. And, the posts are long, designed to be educational and informative to the occupational health & safety professional. Some of the last posts:

• horse racing safety & health
• second hand smoke and casino dealers
• no-nose bicycle saddles
• firing range exposures

There are only one or two posts per month.

[resource] MCOHS training list

Training programs from the Midwest Center of Occupational Health & Safety. MCOHS also has a monthly seminar on campus at Mayo Hall, usually 1-125.

Build it, and they will ... dump?

The MPCA (Minnesota Pollution Control Agency) is excavating the landfill in Washington County to install a modern containment system. As the Strib dubbed it, an "history-making landfill do-over". 33 acres of garbage. $20,000,000. wow. ever notice that people write $20M or $20 million? It doesn't seem so impressive without all the zeros. That has led to one of the biggest attempts to go back and undo decades-old environmental practices that the metro area has ever seen. At the bottom of the 90-foot pit, four dozers were spreading clay that will form the base of the landfill. Compactors with huge spiked rollers were smoothing it. ... The landfill will have three layers of heavy plastic liner, separated by layers of geosynthetic material. Lewis said the new landfill will hold mainly old garbage but is designed with a higher level of protection often used to handle hazardous wastes. It will have three distinct layers to prevent any contaminated water in the landfill from reaching ground water: two feet of compacted clay at the bottom, three layers of heavy plastic above that, and two feet of sand and a collection and drainage system above the liners. an MPCA senior engineer, said no surprises have come to light so far in the nearly 300,000 cubic yards of waste removed. -- now, that in itself is a surprise The state has received some complaints about construction noise since work began in early June, he said, and one call about odor. The contractor is spraying the waste with a slurry of cement and cardboard paper to reduce odors, ... What kind of precedent is being set? Can I complain about the landfill in my part of town (hypothetically) and have the MPCA bring it up to modern standards? Does this remove any grandfather compliance clause about environmental protection? And really, what's the difference - ethically or scientifically - between cleaning up 3M (and other people's) waste and cleaning up the arsenic floating around the Philips Neighborhood over here? Oh, I know the difference. 3M has tons of money and can afford to spend $8,000,000 to help cleanup. The pesticide company which operated in Philips doesn't exist anymore. and, of course: NIMBY "I don't understand how this could have been a viable solution -- to dig this up, put in a liner, and then put it all back into the ground," said ---, who lives a half-mile east of the landfill. She and others at public meetings advised MPCA officials to truck the trash away to be burned or buried elsewhere. "I don't understand" = MPCA didn't do a good enough job communicating the risk management -- or the person quoted represents people who aren't willing to expend the energy to understand. "I don't understand" just isn't the same as "I don't agree with" or "I do understand and I still think this is a poor choice". I do sympathize with people who don't understand it, and don't have the scientific knowledge to know which questions to ask. If someone doesn't understand, and they're not an environmental toxicologist or hazardous waste controller ... how do we expect them to even be able to question our decisions? Ah, back to my criticism of modern American educational system. Although, I would likely have supported hauling it off to incinerate it. Still, this "make this someone else's problem" just aggravates me. I don't like the fact there's arsenic in the neighborhood near mine - but it's not like the MPCA or EPA is going to pull up the top soil for an entire neighborhood and bury it somewhere else. Until someone figures out how to make money at it. .

Less = more?

Fewer mosquitos!!!! Yea!!! Lower risk of bug-borne infectious diseases? uh, probably No risk? unfortunately, no. I have taken advantage of the opportunity to sit in the front yard in the evenings and simply enjoy the utterly delightful weather we've been having this Summer. It is, quite honestly, the nicest Summer weather I can recall in my adult life; it's definitely the nicest since we've moved here to the Mosquito State.

Safety assays for vaccines

FDA struggles how to verify vaccine safety with such a high-pressure rush to produce? [radio story]

Chrality & smell

D-form amino acids tend to taste sweet, whereas L-forms are usually tasteless. Spearmint leaves and caraway seeds, respectively, contain L-carvone and D-carvone - enantiomers of carvone. These smell different to most people because our olfactory receptors also contain chiral molecules that behave differently in the presence of different enantiomers. how odd - I really like spearmint, and I absolutely loathe the taste and smell of caraway seeds. This applies to chemical enantiomers, as well. Hence the stark difference between n-butanol and t-butanol. I recall seeing some chiral compounds being sold as "artificial" sweeteners. Whatever the compound was, it tasted sweet, but it was the wrong handedness to be metabolized. I wondered why that didn't take the place of aspartame (which was at the time the big new 'sweetener' in the wake of sacchrine's PR downfall).

PTFE Exposure

PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) is Teflon(TM), which people will tell you causes cancer or whatever. It might. If you ever get exposed to it. The science is absolutely clear: Teflon-coated pans are safe up to about 780F, a temperature at which anything in the pan will have caught fire. So, as a rule of thumb, you should be careful when flames start shooting out of your nonstick pan. Soon it might get hot enough to emit toxic Teflon particles. People scream about "Risk!" without comprehending what it really means, even qualitatively. Risk = exposure * hazard. therefore .... No exposure = no risk. No doubt this is one of the most difficult problems to overcome, psychologically. Even if the worker intellectually knows this ... their definition of "no exposure" is rarely the same as mine. Well, I suppose "no exposure" is the same. It's the "acceptable exposure" whichis the sticking point ... unfortunately, Teflon doesn't help with this no-stick problem. .

HSE chair Judith Hackitt said children needed to learn how to manage risk. [HSE = Health & Safety Executive - the English sort-of cognate to OSHA] Wow - what a concept! Nearly half of teachers believe the health and safety culture in schools is damaging children's learning and development, a survey suggests. When questioned by Teachers TV, teachers complained about a five-page briefing on using glue sticks and being told to wear goggles to put up posters. I am curious about whether the 'five page briefing' was actually an MSDS...

The plague all over again

BBC is reporting an outbreak of bubonic plague in Lybia. I'm in the midst of reading Camus' The Plague. I was inspired to read it by the conspiracy idiots (read: FBI) reports after the anthrax-letters in '01. The reports stated one of the suspects was extra suspicious due to his collection of books in his office. Quite a few of which are sitting on my shelf. The Plague, however, I hadn't read. Maybe it will make me suspicious (since in 2001 I had access to lots of anthrax)? The book is well written and interesting so far.

MDR Malaria?

An on-going concern about long-term disease control or eradication is the development of resistance to various control mechanisms, such as antibiotics Malaysia is reporting malarial parasites developing resistance to antibiotics.

And in those earlier cases, resistance also started in Western Cambodia, and in a similar way.

No-one is sure why this area seems to have become a nursery for anti-malaria drug resistance.

One factor could be the inappropriate use of drugs, related to a lack of medical supervision.

The public health system is weak. Government clinics often run out of drugs or may be closed when patients want access to them.

Sure, I'm biased after working for an American pharmaceutical firm and dealing with the obsessive compulsive regieme of the FDA. [after being in the hospital and staring at a bag of solution being pumped straight into my body - that will make you change your mind about how good it is for document control and quality assurance.] But really - this is beyond the pale of people here:

All pharmacies are supposed to be licensed. But the stallholder told me he didn't have a licence. He'd applied for one, he said, but the paperwork had never been processed.

Many others running pharmacies, he said, were in the same position.

I watched him and his wife make up their own packets of drugs on the glass-topped counter, shaking a variety of coloured tablets into unlabelled plastic bags.

Employment in Urals

New jobs for IH/evironmental in the Urals in Russia, decommissioning weapons of mass destruction.

Bed Bugs

The Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009 seriously ... that's what it's called. Where do these people get the names for their bills? There are times when I think they must have hired the Schoolhouse Rock staff for writing the names I'm just a bill / yes I'm only a bill / and I'm sittin' here on Capitol Hill ... The EPA held its first-ever bedbug summit last month. Did the attendees stay in a hotel room for the conference? The biggest bedbug outbreak since World War II

holy cow ...

So, we all have our opinions about PPE. We express them to our employers / employees. Most likely repeatedly. In detail. We wonder at times (or at least I do), where all this information goes. Does an employee take this to another job? Does my colleague tell his kid to be safe? Well, I just had the most amazing thing happen. I got quoted on Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace website. I have never had my professional opinion put forth in such a public manner. Of course, what happens? My husband then starts arguing about whether this statement is actually 100% true. Well, what if Respirator A is actually a bit more effective than Respirator B, although both are marketed as N-95? If A is more expensive than B, then my statement to MPR is invalid ... I suppose I should have argued in that case, if B is more expensive than A, then I could equally have said cheaper is better, and been equally wrong. As if anything in the world is ever 100% exactly the same 100% of the time ...

Libby, part 2

earlier in the saga, the EPA posted Q&A about the earlier suit: Q : Can Grace sue me to recover money it is required to pay EPA for cleanup of my property?

A : Yes. Grace has the right to sue you, but the court must first decide to what extent you may be held responsible. EPA provided No Action Assurances to owners of residential and business properties in Libby. These assurances indicate that EPA will not seek the cost of cleanup from you. The No Action Assurance will tell the court that EPA does not believe you should be held responsible for those costs.

So, the EPA won't screw you out of money to pay for this??? What in god's name do they think funds the EPA? My taxes. Oh, okay - so EPA won't see restitution from the residents - they get it from me! Grace being able to sue a homeowner to recoup money they need to spend to cover their illegal/unethical activities which caused the homeowner to get asbestosis(read: lung cancer)? How much more obscene can you get?