Suchergebnisse

In this incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half century, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner focus on one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health. Lead Wars details how the nature of the epidemic has changed and highlights the dilemmas public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland's Court of Appeals-which considered whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) engage

Deceit and Denial details the attempts by the chemical and lead industries to deceive Americans about the dangers that their deadly products present to workers, the public, and consumers. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner pursued evidence steadily and relentlessly, interviewed the important players, investigated untapped sources, and uncovered a bruising story of cynical and cruel disregard for health and human rights. This resulting exposé is full of startling revelations, provocative arguments, and disturbing conclusions--all based on remarkable research and information gleaned from secret i

As this short history of occupational safety and health before and after establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) clearly demonstrates, labor has always recognized perils in the workplace, and as a result, workers' safety and health have played an essential part of the battles for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. OSHA's history is an intimate part of a long struggle over the rights of working people to a safe and healthy workplace. In the early decades, strikes over working conditions multiplied. The New Deal profoundly increased the role of the federal government in the field of occupational safety and health. In the 1960s, unions helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of workers and their unions to push for federal legislation that ultimately resulted in the passage of the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. From the 1970s onward, industry developed a variety of tactics to undercut OSHA. Industry argued over what constituted good science, shifted the debate from health to economic costs, and challenged all statements considered damaging.

Canada is proposing a ban on asbestos, and the US Environmental Protection Agency has listed it among the first 10 materials it is investigating under the new Toxic Substances Control Act revisions. However, this effort is currently running up against enormous industry and political opposition. Here, we detail the activities in the early 1970s of the Friction Materials Standards Institute, an industry trade association, to stifle earlier attempts to regulate asbestos use in brake linings, one of the oldest and most obvious sources of asbestos exposure to mechanics, among others. (Am J Public Health. 2017: 1395–1399. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.303901)

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the Workers Right to Know laws later in that decade were signature moments in the history of occupational safety and health. We have examined how and why industry leaders came to accept that it was the obligation of business to provide information about the dangers to health of the materials that workers encountered. Informing workers about the hazards of the job had plagued labor–management relations and fed labor disputes, strikes, and even pitched battles during the turn of the century decades. Industry's rhetorical embrace of the responsibility to inform was part of its argument that government regulation of the workplace was not necessary because private corporations were doing it.

Examining previously underused corporate documents, we revisit the story of the Asbestos Information Association/North America, an industry trade group that sought in the early 1970s to counteract the growing public attention to, and government regulation of, asbestos as a serious threat to workers and consumers. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, according to its own spokesperson, asbestos was exposed as "probably the most hazardous industrial material ever unleashed on an unsuspecting world." In retrospect, thousands of lives may have been saved if the Asbestos Information Association had publicly acknowledged this earlier.

Les risques environnementaux et professionnels préoccupent de plus en plus les pays industrialisés soumis, vieillissement des populations aidant, à l'aggravation du fléau des maladies chroniques.Aux États-Unis,la responsabilité de ces formes nouvelles d'exposition aux produits toxiques se juge devant les tribunaux. Ces dernières années, la question de savoir à quel moment les entreprises,chimiques ou autres,ont eu connaissance de la nocivité de leurs produits,a mené les jurys à solliciter les historiens.Certains ont mis leur expertise au service de l'industrie dans les procès intentés par les ouvriers ou les consommateurs de tabac, de plomb ou d'amiante. D'autres ont au contraire témoigné au profit des plaignants, à commencer par les auteurs du présent article qui retracent leur expérience dans des affaires liées à l'exposition d'enfants ou d'ouvriers à la silice, au plomb et aux plastiques. Ils analysent la réaction des entreprises mais aussi des autres historiens à leur implication dans ces procès.Ils s'efforcent de déterminer le rôle possible des historiens au prétoire,et comment articuler leur éthos professionnel avec l'argumentaire juridique.

From the beginning of its history, industry has responded to calls for government regulation by arguing that voluntary compliance was sufficient to ensure that it acted responsibly. Here we outline three cases that raise broad policy questions concerning the degree to which we can trust industry to control its own behavior with regard to industrial pollutants. First, we outline the experience of Americans with the lead industry, the producer of a well known industrial toxin. Second, we look at the silica using industries, whose central mineral caused innumerable deaths & disabilities to exposed workers in the 1930s. Finally, we trace the efforts of the plastics industry to keep knowledge about the carcinogenic potential of vinyl chloride secret from the government. 51 References. [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications, Inc.]

Examines opposition by industry leaders which has blocked adoption of permissible exposure limits of silica and banning of sand as an abrasive in blasting, as recommended by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH); 1970-97; US.