Environmental Health and Safety

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Starting January 1, 2014, health care workers in California will have new protections in the form of legislation that establishes workplace safety practices for the safe handling of chemotherapy drugs.

A combined population of 30,000 firefighters from three large cities had higher rates of several types of cancers, and of all cancers combined, than the U.S. population as a whole, researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and colleagues found in a new study.

Handwashing is an easy, inexpensive, and effective way to prevent the spread of germs and keep employees healthy. Handwashing gives people the opportunity to take an active role in their own health. Most handwashing studies have focused on child care or health care settings.

In this case, it does much more than merely hurt. “This case” refers to last Thursday’s (October 24, 2013) rather extraordinary admission by OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels that hundreds of OSHA’s permissible exposures limits (PELs) are far out of date, basically useless, and in fact dangerous.

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) is taking issue with an online tool developed by OSHA to help employers assess the relative safety of potential alternatives for hazardous chemicals. While the ACC said it welcomed OSHA’s recent launch of a website making it easier to access up-to-date information on Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) for the workplace, it feels more input is needed.

The better our understanding of exposures and the risks they pose, the more assurance we have that we are controlling the most important (highest risk) exposures first. Control efforts (such as engineering, work practice, or personal protective equipment) are often costly to implement and maintain.

Organizations opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline are pointing to a September oil spill that leaked 865,000 gallons of oil (at least 20,600 barrels) across seven acres a North Dakota farm as an example of what a spill of the same magnitude would mean for landowners along the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline route.