The legal assault on Johnson & Johnson and its signature baby powder reached new heights today, when a state court jury in Missouri found the company responsible for the ovarian cancers of 22 women, and ordered the drug and consumer products giant to pay $4.69 billion in compensatory and punitive damages to the cancer victims or their survivors.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) is outlining its vision for cancer control in the decades ahead in a series of articles that form the basis of a national cancer control plan. The ACS is calling it a blueprint toward the control of cancer and a mortality reduction goal for the year 2035.

Bicycle helmets have been shown to reduce the risk of head injuries in cycling, but, until now, consumers who want to buy one that offers the best protection have had little information to go on. A new ratings program, based on collaborative research by Virginia Tech and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), fixes that.

Cal/OSHA has issued citations to marine cargo handler SSA Pacific Inc. for willful and serious safety violations following the investigation of a fatal forklift accident at the Port of San Diego.

European Union (EU) legislators are considering adding or updating five binding occupational exposure limit values (OELs) to the Carcinogens and Mutagens Directive (CMD), in an effort to decrease the number of occupational cancers that cause more than 100 000 deaths a year in the EU.

An increase in workplace fatalities in three Midwestern states has OSHA concerned enough to ramp up the “Safe + Sound Campaign" it launched in 2017 – one which urges employers to develop and implement a safety and health program that includes management leadership, worker participation, and a systematic approach to finding and fixing hazards.

The adult smoking rate is at a historically low level, according to the 2017 National Health Interview Survey released recently by the CDC. The figures show that adult smoking rates decreased from 15.5 percent in 2016 to 13.9 percent in 2017 – numbers that “reflect enormous progress in fighting tobacco use and will yield tremendous benefit to lung health in this country,” according to Harold P. Wimmer, National President and CEO of the American Lung Association (ALA).

One firefighter is dead and six others hospitalized after battling a massive natural gas explosion in Wisconsin yesterday. One civilian was treated and released.

While most of the discussion of President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court focuses on the possibility that he will be the deciding vote to repeal Rowe v. Wade or that the will bend over backwards to help Trump out of the Russia investigation, there is clear evidence that Kavanaugh is overly friendly to corporate America, and hostile to workplace safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the environment.

Few people know that there are federal safety limits for exposure to the weak radiation emitted by cellphones and other wireless devices. There often is language about this embedded right in our phones, but finding it requires knowing where to look, wading through sometimes five or more steps and then making sense of the technical jargon.