NIOSH researchers involved in an effort to characterize chemical hazards in the oil and gas extraction industry have found elevated levels of silica exposure during hydraulic fracturing operations.

A dramatic increase in oil and natural gas production in the U.S. has been accompanied by a rise in the fatality rate among industry workers, according to NIOSH Director Dr. John Howard, who says a new NIOSH study finds a direct relationship between the number of drilling rigs and the industry’s fatality rate.

A trio of top occupational safety associations is urging Congress to “champion the safety and health of America’s workers” by supporting funding for OSHA and NIOSH, saving vital programs and blocking what it calls “troubling policy riders.”

NIOSH has released e-tables that make data from its Childhood Agricultural Injury Survey (CAIS) available to the public online.

Updating PELs, OSHA’s Injury and Illness Prevention Program (I2P2) and getting more respect are the top upcoming issues for safety professionals, according to a survey conducted by the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA).

One construction worker a day dies on a worksite from a fall. One a day. That’s what the national data consistently tells us, since one-third of all deaths on construction sites are from falls. Every year more than 10,000 construction workers in the private construction industry experience serious, even life-changing, injuries from a fall.

Dr. John Howard, director of NIOSH, gave an audience of several hundred at the National Safety Congress what was for him a different type of presentation.

Since its creation, NIOSH has been responsible by law for administering a program that offers chest radiographs, or x-rays, to provide underground coal miners with medical monitoring for coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or "black lung," the term by which this serious but preventable occupational lung disease is probably better known among the general public.