"The lessons of the Rana Plaza disaster have still not been learned"
May 21, 2015
In the wake of a fire this week in a Manila shoe factory that killed 72 workers, the Philippine government is considering criminalizing some occupational safety and health and building code violations.
One fatality is too many, but there’s good news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the U.S. workplace fatality rate set a record low in 2013, dropping to 3.3 deaths for every 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.
Falls, other hazards found at Florida construction site
May 20, 2015
Nine contractors at the Oasis Park Square residential development in Doral, Florida learned a hard lesson when OSHA inspectors visited the work site in November 2014.
Cleanup workers using 17 vessels are continuing efforts to remove 100,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the ocean and on the land 20 miles north of Santa Barbara, California, according to news sources. As of Thursday night, some 9,500 gallons of oily water had been skimmed from the ocean. Officials say the clean-up -- which is complicated by currents, tides and the wind -- could take months.
NIH study finds varied responses to calorie restriction in obese adults
May 20, 2015
For the first time in a lab, researchers at the National Institutes of Health found evidence supporting the commonly held belief that people with certain physiologies lose less weight than others when limiting calories. Study results published May 11 in Diabetes.
NHTSA launches its annual reminder that seat belts save lives
May 19, 2015
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today launched its 2015 “Click It or Ticket” campaign to encourage the use of life-saving seat belts. According to NHTSA’s data, in 2013, seat belts saved an estimated 12,584 lives among passenger vehicle occupants 5 and older. Historically, seat belts saved nearly 62,468 lives from 2009 to 2013.
“The problem for me became very severe and my head nurse actually called me into her office to discuss it… it had gotten to the point where I was so chronically sleep-deprived that I was falling asleep while I was trying to report off to the on-coming shift. So, I’m sitting there talking about very complicated medical issues, and in the middle of a sentence, I would nod-off."
A pair of OSHA inspectors had just finished a workplace inspection and were heading back to their Providence, Rhode Island office when they caught sight of a dangerous situation at another site.