Hundreds of anti-transgender bills proposed in state legislatures are sold as measures to protect minors — such as Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act and Montana’s Youth Health Protection Act — but advocacy groups and doctors warn that the effect is exactly the opposite. So far this year, legislators in nearly every state have introduced over …
Workplace regulators in California are drafting an emergency rule to address an epidemic of silicosis — a deadly, preventable lung disease — among fabricators of artificial-stone countertops. In December, Public Health Watch, LAist and Univision revealed what’s believed to be the nation’s biggest cluster of the disease, in the Los Angeles area. The news outlets’ …
Continue reading “California regulators drafting emergency rule to combat deadly lung disease”
A recent investigation by Public Health Watch and The Texas Tribune revealed government negligence before and during a devastating 2019 fire at a tank farm in the Houston suburb of Deer Park. Earlier this month, a public hearing was held for that facility. The next day, another big fire broke out at a plant down the road.
The Texas Tribune analyzed previously unreported air monitoring data and records from the 2019 ITC chemical disaster near Houston and found that high benzene levels lingered in the air for two weeks after public health measures were lifted. Experts say more shelter-in-place advisories should have been issued.
Regulators repeatedly documented — but did little to address — problems at a Houston-area tank farm. Then disaster struck. On March 17, 2019, a fire blew through a corner of the facility, releasing toxic chemicals into nearby communities for weeks.
Texarkana is split into twin cities — one in Arkansas with Medicaid expansion, one in Texas without it. More than a decade after the Affordable Care Act was signed, differences have emerged.
Even as wildfires intensify each year, the people who risk their lives to fight them are often denied workers’ compensation for what firefighters contend are job-related cancers. This is happening even though all 50 states have laws or programs that presume at least some cancers in firefighters are work-related, in theory making it easier for …
Ben Brickhouse came to his career as a late bloomer. In December 2003, when he was 41 years old, he took a vacation to Asheville, North Carolina, and fell in love with the mountain town. He not only decided to stay but also to become a firefighter. His plans to work 20 years and retire …
When Ward Walker moved to the seaside village of Stebbins, Alaska, in 1995, he was told there would be running water within the next five years. The 63-year-old, who recently retired as vice mayor of the village of roughly 650, now says he’ll be happy if it happens before he dies. Stebbins became Walker’s home …
This story is part of a collaboration among Public Health Watch, KPCC/LAist and Univision, and is being re-published by IRW. UPDATE: May 17, 2023: California’s OSHA takes action. LOS ANGELES — The men are haggard, starved of breath and tethered to oxygen tanks. Neither will live to an old age; without lung transplants, both may …
Two years after going live, TAP hits a major milestone.
Investigating Power is a history of breakthrough investigations that revealed news and changed the national narrative on many major topics since the 1950s, from war to health to civil rights.
An interactive timeline following President Biden’s actions on immigration.
In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
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