Environmental & Public Health

In his experience as a firefighter, paramedic, union officer, green chemistry leader, and now Director of the UC Berkeley Labor Occupational Health Program, Switzer Fellow Mike Wilson (2002) has learned that when someone is injured, sickened, or killed on the job, the immediate cause is usually obvious: an unguarded machine, a blocked exit door, a toxic chemical, exposure to silica, and so forth.

At dawn, at the loading dock behind the kitchen at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital of Ann Arbor, Michigan, small lift loaders and handcarts trundle boxes from food trucks to storage rooms. The perishables go straight to immense walk-in refrigerators packed with processed produce—buckets of cubed melons, bags of pre-washed lettuce, packages of onions diced by the quarter-, half-, and three-quarter inch.

The Los Angeles Times also ran an excellent story on this subject: "An exquisite Mexico beach, cursed by plastic" (January 27. 2012)

Babies born to women pregnant during wildfires in Southern California in 2003 tended to have slightly lower birthweights than babies born to women pregnant in the same area at other times, according to a recently released study out of UC Berkeley.

Sue Chiang, pollution prevention co-director of the Oakland, California-based Center for Environmental Health, spoke with CIO Journal about how IT departments can make their work greener. Read the full story

"I've worked on contaminated sites for more than 20 years and I've never seen anything on the scale that I saw in Nigeria," said Donna Vorhees, an adjunct assistant professor of environmental health at BUSPH. "They're not just exposed – these people are actually living in petroleum." Read the full story