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Hi-viz cooling garments, portable lighting and lightweight safety glasses were among the top occupational safety and health products featured on ISHN.com this week.

Occupational fatalities in red and blue states, Congressional efforts to eliminate federal regulations and one company’s safety success were among the stories featured on ISHN.com this week.

Acting on a complaint in June 2016, OSHA found employees of one of the Verona, New Jersey area's largest general contractors working in an unprotected 10-foot deep excavation at a suburban New Jersey high school, in violation of federal safety and health laws. OSHA announced today it has issued citations for nine violations - one willful and eight serious - to The Landtek Group Inc., a New York-based general contractor that specializes in sports facility design and construction. The company faces $197,752 in fines as a result.

Should OSHA stop setting standards – at least for the foreseeable future? Should the agency cease to exist on a federal level, and its responsibilities be performed by state OSH agencies? ISHN put these questions to its readers recently in an online survey.

Labor Secretary nominee Alexander Acosta appears headed for a much smoother confirmation process that the one experienced by his predecessor, Andrew Puzder, who was forced to withdraw after losing support from both Republicans and Democrats alike.

Experimental evidence confirms what surveys have long suggested: Physicians are more likely to prescribe antibiotics when they believe there is a high expectation of it from their patients, even if they think the probability of bacterial infection is low and antibiotics would not be effective, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Although newly approved EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told agency employees this week that it’s possible to be both pro-energy and pro-environment, critics say thousands of recently released emails show that Pruitt is firmly in the pro-energy camp.

More than 4,800 American workers are killed on the job each year. But in states that were carried by Donald Trump, the chances of dying at work are higher than in states that Hillary Clinton won. With a single exception, the states that voted Republican had at least three job-related deaths per 100,000 workers, according to the most recent federal labor statistics for 2015. In all but two states that went Democratic, the workplace death rate was less than three.

Workplace safety and health regulations would be among those affected by a sweeping measure making its way through Congress that would enable lawmakers to overturn any and all regulations passed during the final year of a President’s term.

A U.S. House of Representatives measure would nullify OSHA’s new electronic recordkeeping rule, which requires employers to electronically submit injury and illness data that they already record. Under the rule, which was published in the Federal Register on May 12, 2016, all establishments with 250 or more employees in industries covered by the recordkeeping regulation must electronically submit to OSHA injury and illness information from OSHA Forms 300, 300A, and 301.