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The Protecting America's Workers Act currently pending in Congress would strengthen and modernize the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 by giving OSHA additional tools to ensure that employers promptly correct hazardous working conditions, protect workers from retaliation when they blow the whistle on unsafe working conditions, and hold employers accountable for violations that cause death or serious injury to workers.

The West Fertilizer Company facility that exploded in a deadly blast last week had not been inspected by OSHA in at least 10 years, according to advocacy group Public Citizen, which says too many similar facilities operate “with very little oversight” from regulatory agencies.

OSHA has cited Keystone Pain Institute with eight serious health violations involving bloodborne pathogen hazards at the company's Altoona facility. The February inspection by OSHA's Pittsburgh Area Office was prompted by a complaint and resulted in $46,800 in proposed penalties.

This week’s top products as featured on ISHN.com: a device that keeps important items handy and safe and a tool to improve emergency communications.

From a deadly explosion at a TX fertilizer plant to health care workers’ risk of exposure to chemotherapy drugs, here are the top OEHS-related stories as featured on ISHN.com:

Those of us who work in workplace safety and health know that workplace health is an integral part of public health. While “Creating a Healthy Workplace” is one of the five themes of National Public Health Week, the role of workplace health in Public Health is not always clear to the general public.

Treating a common sleep disorder doesn’t just improve sleep; it also has a beneficial affect while the sleeper is awake – in the workplace. In a new study, patients who underwent three months of treatment for sleep apnea, a common sleep disorder, reported significant improvements in their daytime sleepiness levels and work productivity.

At a construction site in New Jersey, a train depot in Illinois, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and other locations in the U.S., Canada and hundreds of other countries, ceremonies will be held in late April and early May to commemorate Worker’s Memorial Day 2013 (in Canada it’s known as Workers’ Day of Mourning).

In addition Workers Memorial Day in many countries and Workers’ Day of Mourning in Canada, April 28^th has also been designated World Day for Safety and Health at Work. The focus this year is on the prevention of occupational diseases.

Approximately eight million U.S. health care workers are year are potentially exposed to hazardous drugs used to treat patients. “It seems counter-intuitive that the health care industry, whose mission is the care of the sick, is itself a "high-hazard" industry for the workers it employs,” notes a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage on the subject.