Environmental Health and Safety

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Wearables, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) were all featured prominently in this year’s top safety technology stories.

A small mattress manufacturing operation in Puerto Rico has succeeded in updating and improving work practices, improving machine guarding, increasing employee participation in safety and health activities, and improving the safety and health management system already in place at the site with help from Puerto Rico Consultation Services, which performs local assessments and consults as part of federal OSHA’s On-Site Consultation Program.

Hours of service regulations for truckers, workplace violence prevention and hazardous materials that endanger bees and people were among the top regulatory stories during 2019.

On the first day of work my employer gave to me training in using PPE On the second day of work my employer gave to me nitrile rubber gloves and training in using PPE

A large new study finds that women who lost weight after age 50 and kept it off had a lower risk of breast cancer than women whose weight remained stable, helping answer a vexing question in cancer prevention. The reduction in risk increased with the amount of weight lost and was specific to women not using postmenopausal hormones.

Have a cockroach problem? Before you order pesticides online, consider this: the EPA has issued a “Stop Sale” order to online marketplace Bonanza.com requiring the company to immediately halt sales of a dozen imported pesticide products not legal -- or safe -- for sale in the United States. Among the unregistered, illegal pesticides targeted by the order is “Miraculous Insecticide Chalk" -dangerous because of its documented history of causing illness in children who mistake the chalk for regular sidewalk or black board chalk.

In 1998, an historic landmark legal settlement between 46 states and the major tobacco companies, – along with individual settlements with four other states – required the companies to pay more than $246 billion over time as compensation for tobacco-related health care costs.

A ten-year spike in workplace deaths is unacceptable and calls for urgent action, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) said today. “As we prepare to gather with our families this holiday season, everyone who is committed to workplace safety will be thinking about the 5,250 U.S. workers who will never see their loved ones again,” said Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH.

From an outbreak of mysterious lung-injury deaths to America’s near loss of measles elimination status, the beginning of the end of the U.S. HIV epidemic to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), CDC worked around the clock – and around the globe – to protect Americans from domestic and global health threats in 2019.