Environmental Health

This week, Amy Liebman, MPA, MA, Director of Environmental and Occupational Health at MCN, is in Washington, DC to serve on the Pesticide Program Dialogue Committee. Liebman is beginning her two-year term as a returning member of the federal advisory committee, which meets regularly with the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pesticide Programs to discuss pesticide policies.

The final days of harvest have arrived for much of the country. The last sugar beets are being pulled out of the ground in North Dakota; apple harvest has a few more weeks in New York State. In California, the opposite is true. Slightly cooler weather in the Central Valley means farms are green with young plants to fill America’s plates through the winter.

This week, Homero Segovia, Migrant Clinicians Network’s Health Network Associate, tragically lost his life in a car accident. We at Migrant Clinicians Network struggled to keep working with the weight of this massive loss upon us. The trouble is, the work keeps piling up; all the momentum in the world of health justice hasn’t stopped (which, we know, is a positive thing). Next week, we will offer a blog post to commemorate Homero and his work at MCN.

This week’s post could have been called “A few dozen on Friday” -- there were lots of happenings in the world of health justice for the mobile poor. Here’s a tidy selection of the offered news pieces recommended by MCN staff.

1. Charlotte, Development Manager, noted this Texas Tribune article detailing the opposition in Dallas against legislation for rest breaks for construction workers.

This month, Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN) was awarded a Susan Harwood Training Grant for capacity building from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). MCN’s project, Worker Safety and Health in Community Health Centers: A sustainable and integrative approach to immigrant safety and health, will target immigrant workers in hazardous industries, in both rural and urban areas.

Migrant Clinicians Network is thrilled to announce today that the Environmental Protection Agency has at long last released its revised Worker Protection Standard, fortifying the rules that protect agricultural workers in fields across the US. We at MCN, along with dozens of our partners in farmworker and environmental health, applaud the newly amended WPS, which includes important provisions to protect farmworkers and pesticide applicators from pesticide exposure.

To round out our celebration of National Farm Safety and Health Week, we dedicate this week’s Five on Friday blog to the health and well-being of children in agricultural settings. Here are some recommendations from our staff.

National Farm Safety & Health Week is an annual campaign that recognizes the essential yet extremely hazardous work of our nation’s farmers. Today, we’re shining a light on America’s dairy farms and farmworkers because, really, who could imagine a life without cheese?

This week marks National Farm Safety and Health Week. While there is much to be celebrated in terms of advancements in farm safety, there is still much work to be done -- particularly when over 100 children are killed each year on farms in the US from largely preventable incidents, as reported by the Childhood Agricultural Safety Network. These avoidable farm tragedies affect children and their families for life.