Protecting What's Right

Congress is considering a bill that would increase fines for worker safety violations in public industry, to strengthen incentives for employers to improve safety on the job.

If passed, the bill will represent the first increase in employer fines since 1990, in spite of increases in the cost of living.  The bill would raise the maximum penalty from $7,000 to $12,000 and the maximum for a “willful” violation–where the employer was indifferent to the legal requirements for employee safety–would increase from $70,000 to $250,000.

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Occupational health specialists are concerned that chronic exposure to chemotherapy drugs by health care workers may cause cancers and other health conditions.  Studies dating back to the 1970s have linked exposure to chemotherapy drugs to an increased rate of certain types of cancers in health workers.  It is believed that such health workers are chronically exposed to chemotherapy drugs through frequent contact with the drugs through mixing them, accidental spills, and other means.

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After three days of encouraging pressure tests, a senior BP official said Sunday that the company’s recently capped Gulf well was holding well and that the company hoped to keep it closed until it could be permanently plugged.

The new BP plan differs greatly from the one the company and the federal government had suggested only a day earlier—to eventually allow the flow of oil to resume temporarily through vents on the cap and collect as much crude as possible through pipes to surface ships.  If BP succeeds in keeping the cap closed until the relief wells are finished, that would mean the gusher would effectively be over.

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Connecticut’s governor has signed into law a bill that will require increased transparency of medical mistakes at hospitals and surgery centers in the state beginning in July 2011.  After that date, the state’s Department of Public Health’s annual reports are to include details of all reported medical mistakes, such as wrong-site surgeries, serious falls, and sexual assaults, as well as information about the hospitals or facilities where the events occurred.

For more information, go to the Harford Courant.