Although the fatal and destructive wildfires in California captured headlines last year, there were likely communities throughout the U.S. that remained untouched by wildfires because of the mitigation efforts of individuals and groups.
Those efforts – which the public is rarely aware of – were honored recently by a partnership consisting of the National Association of State Foresters (NASF), the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC), the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and the USDA Forest Service (USFS).
OSHA has cited RKM Utility Services Inc. for failing to protect workers from hydrogen sulfide after an employee died after exposure to dangerous levels of the gas while working in a trench in Dallas, Texas. OSHA inspectors determined that the company exposed employees to a hazardous atmosphere, failed to train employees on the health hazards of hydrogen sulfide, and did not drain water from the trench.
Most of the emergency responders dispatched to a serious incident involving a toxic gas exposure did not use required respirators for breathing protection, according to a NIOSH-funded investigation published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The gas, phosphine, forms when pesticides containing aluminum phosphide mix with water.
Want to be healthier and help save the planet at the same time? A “planetary health diet” unveiled yesterday in the medical journal Lancet will do both, according to the international team of scientists who developed it.
The authors of the report say changes to the way we eat - across the globe - are urgently needed amid increasing obesity and climate change made worse by population growth, which is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050.
With the recent resurgence of the most severe form of black lung disease among coal miners, especially in central Appalachia, understanding and preventing exposure to the respirable, or inhalable, dust generated during the extraction of coal is paramount. Black lung is a form of pneumoconiosis, or scarring lung disease, caused by breathing in dust that can occur with exposure to respirable coal mine dust.
Some 800,000 furloughed federal employees – along with government contractors and business owners who rely on federal workers – are feeling increasingly stressed out by the partial government shutdown, according to the American Psychological Association (APA).
Government is failing at both the federal and state levels to protect the nation’s children from tobacco-caused death and disease, according to the American Lung Association’s (ALA) 17th annual “State of Tobacco Control” report.
Most of us have had at least one boss who tells workers to “leave their personal problems at the door!” But that advice was never very realistic. And in this day of texting, social media, and a phone in everyone’s pocket, it’s even less likely.
The communication age makes it more important than ever to make stress management a high priority both to keep workers safer and to avoid hits to your company’s bottom line.
One of the strangest – and deadliest – incidents in U.S. history occurred on this day in 1919, when millions of gallons of molasses poured into Boston’s North End, killing 21 people, injuring 150 more and laying waste to two city blocks.
For the first time in U.S. history, a person is more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than from a motor vehicle crash, according to National Safety Council analysis. The odds of dying accidentally from an opioid overdose have risen to one in 96, eclipsing the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash (one in 103). NSC unveiled the analysis on Injury Facts – the definitive resource for data around unintentional, preventable injuries, commonly known as “accidents.”
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