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.

A truck carrying oil overturned and exploded in Nigeria on Friday, killing at least a dozen people, and as many as 60, according to news reports. Another 22 people reportedly suffered burn injuries and were taken to local hospitals.

A volunteer firefighter in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, lost his life last July responding to an explosion and fire that resulted from two utility contractors failing to establish the location of underground utilities prior to beginning excavation work.

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.

A supermarket employee, Duoc Tran, fell to his death at Comumbia Market when the ladder he was climbing to retrieve an object for a customer slipped and he fell and hit his head on the floor. A construction worker was killed Saturday in a fall at the Amazon fulfillment center construction site. The Kern County Fire Department said they received a call around 3:30 p.m. for a person who fell near the 1900 block of Petrol Road.

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.

While unions representing air traffic controllers and aviation safety inspectors are warning that the partial government shutdown is endangering the flying public, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – which is in partial function mode – is assuring the public that safety “is the top priority.”