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(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Sleep Experts Say Bosses Should Let Their Employees Take A Nap At Work To Boost Productivity

Today's post was shared by Work Org and Stress and comes from www.medicaldaily.com



Sleep at Work
Sleep at Work

Experts say employees should be allowed to take a nap at work. Reuters
Todays' post is shared from medicaldaily.com

Fatigue is inevitable during any long work day, and sometimes coffee is just not enough to get most people through their midday slump. British sleep experts are now saying that bosses should allow their employees a nap during the day and the option to make their own schedule to help increase productivity. Millions of people fail to get enough sleep during their week and are forced to compensate over the weekend when their work has already suffered.
“It’s best to give your brain downtime,” Vincent Walsh, professor of human brain research at University College London told Cheltenham Science Festival. “I have a nap every afternoon. It’s only since the industrial revolution we have been obsessed with squeezing all our sleep into the night rather than having one or two sleeps through the day.”
A recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health revealed that around 41 million American workers are not getting the seven to nine hours of sleep recommended by the National Sleep Foundation. Sleep deprivation is putting these people and their co-workers in danger of serious injury or death.
Walsh says our obsession with sleeping only at night may be hindering our ability to be more creative. Most of our creative thoughts come to us during periods of relaxation when the brain makes new...
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Workplace Exposures and the National Action Plan for Infertility



Infertility is a significant health issue in the U.S. as well as globally.  In addition to the large health and fiscal impacts of infertility, the inability to conceive can be devastating to individuals or couples. Research suggest that between 12% and 18% of couples struggle with infertility,[1] which may be caused by a wide variety of factors including genetic abnormalities, aging, acute and chronic diseases, treatments for certain conditions, behavioral factors, and exposure to environmental, occupational, and infectious hazards. However, many questions about infertility remain unanswered.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the National Public Health Action Plan for the Detection, Prevention and Management of Infertility. This plan was created in consultation with many governmental and nongovernmental partners.  NIOSH contributed to this Action Plan, specifically related to reducing exposures to occupational agents that can harm reproductive health and fertility in women and men.
Environmental and occupational hazards account for an unknown proportion of infertility cases, but are known to affect reproductive health and fertility in women and men, and suspected of causing declining human sperm quality in industrialized countries.[2], [3], [4] An evaluation conducted in developed countries in the 1980s by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that 37% of infertility cases were attributable to female factors, 8% were attributable to...
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Medical pot covered by workers' comp, says appeals court

If undefined by statute, workers' compensation provides for an almost limitless delivery of medical benefits. What ever "cures and/or relieves" is authorized and is paid for by the employer/insurance carrier. Today's post is shared from hr.blr.com
The New Mexico Court of Appeals recently ruled that an employer must pay for an injured worker's medical marijuana. This appears to be the nation's first appellate court ruling in a workers' compensation case in which an employer has been ordered to pay for medical marijuana prescribed by an employee's healthcare provider to treat a workplace injury.
George Vialpando injured his back in a workplace accident in 2000 while he was employed by Ben's Automotive Services in Santa Fe. For years, he was unable to find pain relief through conventional drugs and treatment. His physician said Vialpando had "some of the most extremely high intensity, frequency and duration of pain, out of all of the thousands of patients I've treated within my seven years practicing medicine."
In 2013, Vialpando was certified by his healthcare providers to participate in the New Mexico medical marijuana program. The program, authorized by the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act, permits an individual to purchase marijuana after receiving certification from a medical practitioner licensed in New Mexico that states he has a debilitating medical condition and the potential health benefits of the medical use of cannabis would likely outweigh the health...
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Monday, July 28, 2014

Attorneys Who Won Landmark Lead Paint Judgment and Cleanup Named Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year



The attorneys who successfully fought for lead paint cleanup in People of California v. Atlantic
Fidelma Fitzpatrick
Richfield were named Sunday as Public Justice’s 2014 Trial Lawyers of the Year.
The 27 attorneys won a $1.15 billion judgment against paint manufacturers last year, successfully arguing that lead paint in homes is a public nuisance that creates a quantifiable risk of harm to children who reside in or visit those homes.
Leading the team of attorneys were (in alphabetical order) Mary E. Alexander of Mary Alexander & Associates, P.C. in San Francisco, Joseph W. Cotchett and Nancy L. Fineman of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP in Burlingame, Calif., Peter Earle of the Law Office of Peter Earle in Milwaukee, Wis., and Fidelma L. Fitzpatrick of the firm Motley Rice in Providence, R.I.
“This is for the children of California,” Mary Alexander said upon accepting the award. Fidelma Fitzpatrick noted that her participation in People of California was the greatest privilege of her professional career.
In California, tens of thousands of children each year have blood lead levels that exceed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold. There is virtual unanimity in the medical and scientific community that the primary cause of lead poisoning in children is the lead paint in their homes. It is also widely understood that the only way to prevent lead poisoning is to remove or remediate the paint in a child’s environment before a child gets poisoned.
...
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Inequality Is Not Inevitable

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
AN insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?
One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II — a period of rapidly falling inequality — as an aberration.
This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects.
Javier Jaén
Over the past year and a half, The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times for which I have served as moderator, has also presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn’t apply in the democracies of the 21st. We don’t need to have this...
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Fast food workers meet in suburban Chicago to plan escalation of demands for higher pay, union

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.newser.com

Fast food workers say they're prepared to escalate their campaign for higher wages and union representation, starting with a national convention in suburban Chicago where more than 1,000 workers will discuss the future of the effort that has spread to dozens of cities in less than two years.

About 1,300 workers are scheduled to attend sessions Friday and Saturday at an expo center in Villa Park, Illinois, where they'll be asked to do "whatever it takes" to win $15-an-hour wages and a union, said Kendall Fells, organizing director of the national effort and a representative of the Service Employees International Union.
The union has been providing financial and organizational support to the fast-food protests that began in late 2012 in New York City and have included daylong strikes and a protest outside this year's McDonald's Corp. shareholder meeting that resulted in more than 130 arrests.
"We want to talk about building leadership, power and doing whatever it takes depending on what city they're in and what the moment calls for," said Fells, adding that the ramped-up actions will be "more high profile" and could...
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Fear of Ebola Breeds a Terror of Physicians

Healthcare professional face serious and fatal virus infections overseas. The conditions contrated within the course of thier employment may be deemed compensble under the Workers' Compensation even though they extra-jurisdiction exposures. Today's post is share from nytimes.com
Eight youths, some armed with slingshots and machetes, stood warily alongside a rutted dirt road at an opening in the high reeds, the path to the village of Kolo Bengou. The deadly Ebola virus is believed to have infected several people in the village, and the youths were blocking the path to prevent health workers from entering.
“We don’t want any visitors,” said their leader, Faya Iroundouno, 17, president of Kolo Bengou’s youth league. “We don’t want any contact with anyone.” The others nodded in agreement and fiddled with their slingshots.
Singling out the international aid group Doctors Without Borders, Mr. Iroundouno continued, “Wherever those people have passed, the communities have been hit by illness.”
Health workers here say they are now battling two enemies: the unprecedented Ebola epidemic, which has killed more than 660 people in four countries since it was first detected in March, and fear, which has produced growing hostility toward outside help. On Friday alone, health authorities in Guinea confirmed 14 new cases of the disease.
Workers and officials, blamed by panicked populations for spreading the virus, have been...
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