Sleep Deprivation Is A Public Health Issue That’s Deadlier Than You Think

Transportation accidents at work are a major component for work related fatalities. Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from thinkprogress.org

By Tara Culp-Ressler on December 5, 2013 at 2:21 pm "Sleep Deprivation Is A Public Health Issue That’s Deadlier Than You Think" On Sunday, a commuter train derailed on its way to Manhattan, killing four people and injuring more than 60. It’s not clear exactly what caused the accident, although some reports indicate that the conductor may have been nodding off at the wheel. That’s sparked a broader conversation about sleep deprivation as a public health concern. Indeed, by some researchers’ estimations, “drowsy driving” is just as dangerous as drunk driving. Both can double the risk of a traffic accident, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that about 100,000 of the annual car crashes in the U.S. directly result from driver fatigue. Teens are particularly at risk for driving while drowsy, a reality that’s led some parents to push to start high school later in the day. The issue is especially serious among transportation workers, who often literally have hundreds of lives in their hands. According to the Huffington Post, multiple public transportation accidents — not just on trains, but also on buses and airplanes — have been attributed to sleep-deprivation over the past decade. According to a 2012 survey from the National Sleep Foundation, about one fourth of these workers admit that a lack of sleep has affected their recent job performance. And many of them also acknowledge that this issue...

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Consumers, Employers Face New Round Of Health Coverage Challenges, Decisions

This news roundup is shared from kaiser.org

The Washington Post: Consumer Tips For Healthcare.gov Show Administration's Cautious Optimism The Obama administration on Sunday reported vast improvement with the HealthCare.gov health-insurance portal that opened with extensive glitches in October, while acknowledging that the site still needs more work. One sign of ongoing problems came in the form of a blog entry and infographic that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius published on Huffington Post. Both items provide tips for consumers visiting the site, most notably by encouraging them to use it during off-peak hours — mornings, nights and weekends (Hicks, 12/2). Kaiser Health News: With Three Weeks Left, Consumers Fear They May End Up Without Health Coverage On New Year’s Day For people in the states with well-functioning insurance websites, such as California, New York and Kentucky, this appears to leave plenty of time. But making the deadline could be dicier for people in Arizona and the 35 other states where the federal website healthcare.gov is the path to coverage, as well as Oregon and Hawaii, which have struggled to get their sites functioning. On Sunday, the government reported progress in improving healthcare.gov, saying the site now allows more than 800,000 visits a day with the rate of timeouts or crashes reduced to below 1 percent. Officials said repairs continue (Rau, 12/2). And for employers - The Washington Post: New...

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California Doctors Prescribe More Name-Brand Drugs Than Any Other State

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

The only thing that perhaps matched the vastness of the spread or the depth of the traction of the "death panel" lie was the predictability that such a lie would come to be told in the first place. After all, this was a Democratic president trying to sell a new health care reform plan with the intention of opening access and reducing cost to millions of Americans who had gone without for so long. What's the best way to counter it? Tell everyone that millions of Americans would have increased access ... to Death! The best account of how the "death panel" myth was born into this world and spread like garbage across the landscape has been penned by Brendan Nyhan, who in 2010 wrote "Why the "Death Panel" Myth Wouldn't Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate."

Largest Civil Disobedience In Walmart History Leads To More Than 50 Arrests

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

Surrounded by about 100 police officers in riot gear and a helicopter circling above, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday night as they sat in the street protesting what they called the retailer's "poverty wages." Organizers said it was the largest single act of civil disobedience in Walmart's 50-year history. The 54 arrestees, with about 500 protesting Walmart workers, clergy and supporters, demonstrated outside LA's Chinatown Walmart. Those who refused police orders to clear the street after their permit expired were arrested without incident. Those who fail to post $5,000 bail would be jailed overnight, Detective Gus Villanueva, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, told The Huffington Post. Their primary demand to Walmart: pay every full-time worker at least $25,000 a year. One of the protesting Walmart workers, Anthony Goytia, a 31-year-old father of two, said he believes he will make about $12,000 this year. It's a daily struggle, he said, "to make sure my family doesn't go hungry." "The power went out at my house yesterday because I couldn't afford the bill," Goytia told HuffPost. "I had to run around and get two payday loans to pay for my rent from the first" of the month. "Yesterday we went to a food bank." To make ends meet, Goytia said he sometimes participates in clinical trials and sells his blood plasma. He has been asking his managers for full-time employment for a year and a half. Instead, he said,...

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Canadian Pipeline Incidents Have Doubled In The Past Decade

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

Oct 28 (Reuters) - The rate of safety-related incidents on federally regulated pipelines in Canada doubled over the last decade, while the rate of reported spills and leaks was up threefold, according to an investigative report by Canada's national broadcaster. The total number of incidents, which included everything from spills to fires, swelled from 45 in 2000 to 142 in 2011, the CBC reported on Monday, citing data from the National Energy Board (NEB) obtained through access-to-information requests. That translated to a doubling from one incident for every 1,000 km (620 miles) of federally-regulated pipeline in 2000, to two in 2011. The CBC investigation also found that the rate of product reported releases - spills and leaks - rose threefold, from four releases for every 10,000 km in 2000, to 13 in 2011. The NEB regulates all pipelines that cross provincial or international borders, but does not monitor smaller pipelines that are only in a single province. The safety of shipping petroleum products via pipelines has become a hot topic in recent years, with companies like Enbridge Inc and TransCanada Corp developing major new projects to move crude from Canada's oil sands to markets in the United States and Asia. Opponents say a pipeline leak can cause catastrophic environmental damage and often cite a 2010 incident where an Enbridge pipeline carrying crude from Alberta ruptured, spilling huge amounts of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. But pipeline companies say their...

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EPA Hits The Road To Seek Input On New Rules

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

The U.S. states that already have a plan in place to cut carbon pollution from power plants are likely to make the case to regulators this week that their program offers a viable model for others to follow. The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday kicks off an 11-city "listening tour" as part of its effort to craft emissions rules for existing power plants. The tour starts in New York and Atlanta. Meetings will then be held from Boston to Seattle, wrapping up on Nov. 8. The agency is expected to solicit ideas on how best to regulate carbon emissions from the more than 1,000 power plants now in operation - the cornerstone and arguably the most controversial part of the Obama administration's strategy to address climate change. The EPA will use a rarely employed section of the federal Clean Air Act, known as section 111(d), and will rely heavily on input from states to craft a flexible rule that can be applied to states with different energy profiles. President Barack Obama set a June 2014 deadline for the agency to propose its rules, which need to be finalized in June 2015. Officials from some of the nine northeastern states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) - a carbon trading program targeting power sector emissions - will attend some of the sessions and make the case that the initiative has a "plug and play" option for states to meet future federal...

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McDonald's Profit Is Awkwardly Close To What It Costs Taxpayers Every Year

Low wages impact benefits, create more income for the employer and cost taxpayers. Shifting the costs. Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

McDonald's announced Monday that it raked in $1.5 billion in profits in the third quarter, up 5 percent from last year. The number is strikingly close to the $1.2 billion taxpayers are shelling out each year to help pay public assistance to the McDonald's workforce, according to a report released last week by the National Employment Law Project. The echoing numbers are simply a coincidence, but underscore the immense profits that the chain continues to pull in while its workers simply struggle to afford food, medical help and housing. The public assistance McDonald's workers receive comes via food stamps, welfare, Medicaid and other federal programs, according to the NELP report. In a statement to The Huffington Post, McDonald's emphasized that workers get training and the opportunity for career advancement. The company also said that its franchisees pay competitive wages that are based on "local wage laws." Those wages are stunningly low. Frontline fast-food workers make a median wage of $8.94 an hour, according to a recent Reuters report. "Fast-food workers work only 24 hours a week on average — at $8.94 an hour, this adds up to barely $11,000 a year," wrote Christine Owens for Reuters in August. With wages that low, front-line fast food workers are more than twice as likely as the typical worker to participate in a government assistance program, according to the NELP report: The National Restaurant Association, an industry trade group, last week labeled the NELP report...

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Naloxone Expansion In California Will Enable Family, Friends To Save Lives At Home

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

Family and friends of more drug users in California will soon be able to reverse overdoses at home with a lifesaving injectable drug. On Thursday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Assembly Bill 635, authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, which will expand the use of the drug naloxone. Naloxone, also known by its brand name Narcan, can be administered to a person suffering from an opiate overdose to restore breathing. Naloxone is non-addictive, non-toxic, fairly cheap and is easy to administer through the nose or intravenously. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1971 and is stocked in thousands of emergency rooms, ambulances and post-surgery recovery rooms across the country. But frequently, opiate users don't make it to the hospital in time. For that reason, in 2008, California implemented a pilot program in seven counties that allowed drug users, their family and friends, health care professionals and addiction counselors to administer naloxone in an emergency -- and be protected from civil or criminal liability if anything goes wrong. The bill that Brown signed into law extends the program across all of California. Starting Jan. 1, drug users and their family and friends will be able to request a naloxone prescription from a doctor or addiction treatment program. For example, "if a teen is known to be picking up OxyContin, their family might -- in the treatment process -- want a naloxone prescription, just in case," Ammiano's communications director Carlos...

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What Happens When The Government Shuts Down 94 Percent of the EPA

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Tuesday morning, 94 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's 16,000 workers were furloughed due to the government shutdown. "They basically lock things up, batten things down, which takes a few hours, then a vast majority of people are sent home," says consultant Dina Kruger, who worked at the EPA during the 1996 government shutdown. To make sense of what it means that over 15,000 EPA employees are now sitting at home instead of working, consider how many facets of the environment the agency has its hands in: The EPA monitors air quality, regulates pesticides and waste, cleans up hazardous chemical spills, and ensures that people have safe drinking water, among other things. Now, according to the plan it laid out for the shutdown, only some workers will be on hand to respond to emergencies and to monitor labs and property. That means the EPA will temporarily halt cleanup at 507 superfund sites across the country, the agency told the Huffington Post. Sites where the EPA was cleaning up hazardous chemicals are shuttered in any situation where closing them down won't be an immediate threat to the surroundings. This will slow down cleanups and tack on additional costs that will accrue as these contaminated sites are left to their own devices, says Scott Slesinger, legislative director at the National Resources Defense Council and a former EPA employee. "The only sites that would be exempted would be those that, if they stopped working...

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Bridge Safety: Many U.S. Spans Are Old, Risky And Rundown

Transportation accidents are one of the leading cause of work-related compensation claims. Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

Motorists coming off the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge into Washington are treated to a postcard-perfect view of the U.S. Capitol. The bridge itself, however, is about as ugly as it gets: The steel underpinnings have thinned since the structure was built in 1950, and the span is pocked with rust and crumbling concrete. District of Columbia officials were so worried about a catastrophic failure that they shored up the horizontal beams to prevent the bridge from falling into the Anacostia River. And safety concerns about the Douglass bridge, which is used by more than 70,000 vehicles daily, are far from unique. An Associated Press analysis of 607,380 bridges in the most recent federal National Bridge Inventory showed that 65,605 were classified as "structurally deficient" and 20,808 as "fracture critical." Of those, 7,795 were both – a combination of red flags that experts say indicate significant disrepair and similar risk of collapse. A bridge is deemed fracture critical when it doesn't have redundant protections and is at risk of collapse if a single, vital component fails. A bridge is structurally deficient when it is in need of rehabilitation or replacement because at least one major component of the span has advanced deterioration or other problems that lead inspectors to deem its condition poor or worse. Engineers say the bridges are safe. And despite the ominous sounding classifications, officials say that even bridges that are structurally...

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