Daily News

State regulators are raising Administrative Procedure Act (APA) concerns about a provision of the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized worker protection standards (WPS), arguing a restriction on pesticide spraying that extends the rule beyond farmers' fields was not proposed for public comment and imposes unreasonable burdens on growers.

Activist groups are objecting to petitions before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that would significantly weaken protective exposure levels to radiation by discarding a long-standing model correlating increasing radiation doses with increasing cancer risks and replacing it with one that would deem certain levels of radiation harmless and even helpful.

Environmentalists are calling for the National Toxicology Program (NTP) to proceed with a review of potential human health risks of neonicotinoids after NTP apparently downplayed the possibility of review following industry arguments that an NTP evaluation would duplicate the Environmental Protection Agency's registration review of the controversial class of pesticides advocates say harm bees.

Leaders of the Environmental Protection Agency's influential Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) assessment program have started preparing colleagues in regional and program offices that use IRIS assessments in their regulatory work for novel risk specific dose calculations that will be included in the pending assessment of arsenic's human health risks.

Worker safety advocates are lauding the decision of a jury on Thursday (Dec. 3) to convict Don Blankenship, the ex-CEO of Massey Energy, on a federal charge stemming from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in 2010. Activists have long pointed to the accident in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners, as underscoring a need for mine safety reform as well as tougher laws governing occupational safety in general, and they believe the verdict further validates those efforts.

Safety activists are urging White House officials to ensure that the Environmental Protection Agency issues a final industrial facility safety rule that includes a mandate to use inherently safer technologies (IST) and to issue it before President Obama leaves office, after learning from EPA that the agency will likely delay proposing the rule and not mandate IST.

OSHA has created new resources for hospitals to put stringent measures in place to prevent workplace violence, the latest step in federal efforts as state plans including California's OSHA program continue to either look at enacting regulations or leveraging existing requirements to reduce violent incidents.

OSHA is holding up a recently completed study from Canada regarding the effectiveness of fines from inspections as bolstering the agency's long-held view that strong enforcement activity has been shown to push down injury and illness rates, coming as the agency gears up to increase its penalty caps. But industry questions the study's relevance to the U.S. enforcement system.

Federal chemical safety investigators approve of several actions taken by petrochemical giant BP -- particularly efforts to ensure workers can lodge safety complaints without fear of retaliation -- in the wake of the deadly 2005 explosions at the company's refinery in Texas City, TX.

OSHA's standards division will not begin preliminary internal work on the rule expected next year to boost the maximums on penalties for safety and health violations until it receives pending guidance from the White House budget office, agency chief David Michaels tells Inside OSHA Online.

OSHA chief David Michaels, looking ahead to his last year in office, says the agency will continue to employ innovative measures to use its limited resources effectively, pointing to areas such as a new inspection weighting system and non-regulatory guidance materials designed to put issues in front of employers, in addition to targeted enforcement and the pursuit of several key rules before the close of the Obama administration.

OSHA's newly rolled-out draft update of its longstanding voluntary program management guidelines, first offered to the public in 1989, can help companies coordinate efforts on multi-employer work sites -- increasingly a concern for occupational safety and health as the U.S. economy becomes more fragmented with temporary employment and similar arrangements, OSHA chief David Michaels tells Inside OSHA Online.

Michaels also touts the guidelines as offering employers a roadmap for increased productivity and profitability.

Trichloroethylene (TCE), a solvent OSHA stakeholders have urged federal officials to consider for tighter workplace regulation, is again subject to controversy as the Environmental Protection Agency sets deadlines for proposing bans of certain uses of several existing chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

Worker health advocates have asked OSHA to look into lowering the permissible exposure limit to TCE.

OSHA's clear signal that it hopes to finish a landmark new rule tackling worker exposures to crystalline silica dust by early next year -- the agency's new regulatory agenda pegs February as the target -- means the almost-inevitable legal and political battles over the rule's specifics could play out during the Obama administration, likely easing the path for OSHA to ensure it gets fully implemented.

A recently released NIOSH study indicates that health care workers continue to be exposed to hazardous “surgical smoke” -- a byproduct of thermal destruction of tissue during operations -- despite the existence of evidence-based practices and recommended controls available to protect them, the research agency said.

The findings were presented in conjunction with the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month.

California's bellwether OSHA program is working to roll out new regulations to tackle workplace violence in the health care sector that worker safety advocates say are groundbreaking and could add to pressure on federal OSHA to consider working on national standards and also heighten general-duty enforcement against violence in health care.

An advisory group to the Environmental Protection Agency is stressing the need for educational outreach to inform family farms of pesticides' risks, arguing an exemption in newly finalized standards intended to protect farm workers from pesticide exposures fails to protect the children of family farmers.

About two-thirds of participants in a survey of people exposed to 9/11 dust and fumes still suffer from treatable asthma symptoms, perhaps underscoring a need for targeted efforts to prevent long-term effects, according to a recently published NIOSH-funded study by New York health officials.

New York worker advocates say city officials are approaching building project safety from a misguided angle by arresting construction workers for fake OSHA training cards, and want authorities to use more discretion before taking enforcement actions that could make workers afraid to cooperate on safety concerns.

A new draft OSHA policy paper describing how employers can prevent infringement on whistlebower rights contains a section specifically targeting safety incentive programs that could be used in a retaliatory manner against workers raising OSHA concerns -- language the agency proposes just as it prepares to finalize an injury reporting rule taking aim at adversarial uses of such programs.