Citizen Health & Safety

Deadly food poisoning breaks out while White House fiddles

Apr 9, 2005 by Guest Blogger

Listeria — the deadly foodborne pathogen with the second highest hospitalization rate and single highest fatality rate of all foodborne pathogens — is breaking out all over: FDA has ordered a nationwide recall of Sea Specialties brand smoked salmon, while a Michigan sausage maker, a Florida maker of chicken meat wraps, and a California producer of teriyaki chicken products all announced voluntary recalls of their products this week, because of potential Listeria contamination.

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OMB Puts Children's Health at Risk with Data Quality Act

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released new guidelines for assessing cancer risk March 29 after years of deliberation. These guidelines officially recognize for the first time that children are particularly vulnerable to certain cancer-causing chemicals. However, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), while reviewing the guidelines, inserted two requirements, including that any EPA cancer evaluation meet the standards of the Data Quality Act (DQA), which will have the effect of putting more children at risk.

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Agencies Continue to Abandon Protective Plans

Key agencies charged with protecting public health, safety and the environment continued to abandon work on long-identified priorities for new or improved regulatory safeguards, according to the fall 2004 Unified Agenda released last December.

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White House Adds Rule to Hit List After Calling it 'Accomplishment'

Just three months after touting an interim rule controlling Listeria in ready-to-eat meats as a "regulatory reform accomplishment," the White House added that same rule to a list of regulations to be weakened or eliminated. Corporate special interests nominated the Listeria rule for rollbacks in response to a call from the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which used its annual draft report on the costs and benefits of regulations last February to request industry's nominations for regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated.

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Sunset, Results Commission Proposals Likely

Both the White House and congressional Republicans have vowed to introduce legislative packages that would force programs to fight for their lives every 10 years and would link controversial performance ratings to decisions about the very structure of government.

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Rolling over on safety: the new evidence

Mar 30, 2005 by Guest Blogger

If your vehicle crashes and rolls over, you should be able to walk away from the crash: the forces in a rollover crash are lower in degree than the forces from other collisions. What should be the case in theory is not, however, the case in fact. Even though rollovers amount to only three percent of all vehicle crashes, rollovers account for one third of all crash fatalities — 10,000 deaths every year. The gap suggests that poor vehicle design makes rollovers more dangerous.

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Playing politics with kids and cancer

Mar 29, 2005 by Guest Blogger

What low won't they stoop to? The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has once again been playing around with the technical analyses that inform regulatory protections, rigging the tools so that they lead to weaker protections that do more to save corporate profits than to protect the people.

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Public Interest Data Quality Appeal Granted by Agency

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) will correct flawed information about the Florida panther after an agency whistleblower and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed requests under the federal Data Quality Act (DQA). This is one of the few cases in which a public interest group used the DQA. To date, industry has dominated the use of the DQA with challenges seeking to delay, derail and dilute information and regulations about health, safety and the environment.

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Pesticide info: too pesky a burden for business?

Mar 24, 2005 by Guest Blogger

As required by law, EPA calls on makers of pesticides to report on the "composition, toxicity, potential human exposure, environmental properties and ecological effects, and efficacy" of pesticides, so that the agency can "assess the human health and environmental risks associated with the product" and "ensure that pesticide residues in food meet the 'reasonable certainty of no harm' risk standard." We need to make sure that we aren't poisoning ourselves with pesticides, and an important component of our protection is the information that pesticide makers must disclose about the pesticides th

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EPA To Roll Back Lead-Based Paint Protection

Mar 23, 2005 by Guest Blogger

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) recently released internal EPA documents that show that Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator, Stephen Johnson, plans to replace a regulation under development by EPA requiring certification of construction workers renovating buildings that may contain lead paint with a voluntary compliance standard. This move to a voluntary standard significantly weakens the regulation and puts more workers and children at risk for lead exposure from dust and debris. From the press release:

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