Five former NIOSH and MSHA administrators sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson last week to protest the Center for Disease Control's plan to move the National Institute for Occupational Safety deeper into the bureaucracy of the CDC. The CDC's new reorganization plan includes the decision to cluster NIOSH with several environmental health agencies into the Coordinating Center for Environmental Health, Injury Prevention, and Occupational Health, one of four coordinating centers that will report directly to the CDC administrator.

Although food safety officials testified to a House subcommittee that two new regulations will enhance existing rules to make an effective firewall against mad cow disease, a new report reveals that the rules mainly protect the meat industry and are not strong enough to prevent contamination of the food supply. According to the report by the href="http://www.progressiveregulation.org">Center for Progressive Regulation, the centerpiece of the mad cow regulation is a so-called "zero tolerance policy" for the introduction into the food chain of certain cattle parts that are at

The Justice Department (DOJ) issued a brief June 25 recommending the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Salt Institute under the Data Quality Act (DQA). The March 31 lawsuit against the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) challenged agency statements about sodium consumption.

In a stinging rebuke, an appeals court rejected a change to regulations limiting the daily and weekly number of hours that truckers can work without rest breaks. Although the court based its decision on the agency's failure to consider a statutorily mandated factor, it also identified weaknesses in several arguments commonly raised to block regulation, repeatedly calling the arguments "troubling."