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Scientific American
18-06-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
When Wildfire Smoke Arrived from Canada, Federal Safety Experts Were Gone
CLIMATEWIRE | When wildfire smoke wafted from Canada across large swaths of the U.S. in 2023, it served as a wake-up call for federal safety experts. They drafted recommendations to protect outdoor workers from increasingly prevalent smoke. This time, the experts are on administrative leave. That has left a void in the federal health response to the plumes of wildfire smoke that spread across the Midwest earlier this month. The workforce purge under President Donald Trump is also raising questions about whether the 350-page report that was issued after the 2023 fires would ever be finalized, a requirement before its recommendations for protecting workers can be implemented. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. About 80 people who worked on the draft wildfire assessment are slated to be laid off from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for researching how to prevent workplace injuries and death. Each page of the 2023 report states that its findings should not be cited before it's finalized, a process that includes peer review. If it's not completed, health advocates say, employers could lack awareness for how to protect the health of an estimated 20 million laborers who are increasingly being threatened by wildfire smoke. 'The smoke from wildland fires is only becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and yet the experts that know how to protect workers from it are not available, so it's a real loss,' said Rebecca Reindel, who directs occupational health and safety for the AFL-CIO. The layoffs at NIOSH are part of a broad reorganization at DHS under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has prioritized Trump's 'Make America Healthy Again' agenda. The effort resulted in some 10,000 department employees receiving so-called reduction-in-force notices, including many environmental health experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which houses NIOSH, saw its entire National Center for Environmental Health shuttered through administrative leave — including asthma and air pollution staff who also worked on wildfire smoke. That left them unable to answer calls from local health departments, doctors and parents in June as wildfire smoke blew into Midwest communities. At the time, one expert who was on leave told POLITICO's E&E News, 'It feels like we are leaving them on their own to handle this when we should be there to help.' Their RIF notices were revoked one week later. Some staffers at NIOSH have also been called back to work, including experts on personal protective equipment, firefighting and black lung. But the agency's wildfire smoke experts were not reinstated. The 2023 smoke event had forced a reckoning at NIOSH. It was a realization that wildfires could affect workers who weren't actively fighting the blazes. 'We realized that there are a lot of workers that are outside all day long and they're not wildland firefighters, but they don't have an opportunity to get out of wildfire smoke,' said one NIOSH expert who was granted anonymity because their employment status is in flux. The team of 80 staffers set to work in 2023 to conduct research and draft recommendations for how to keep farmworkers and other laborers safe. The issue was a priority for then-Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, who started an initiative to look at the health impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke on farmworkers. When the draft recommendations were published in September 2024, it was the first "federal-level authoritative document that addresses smoke exposures for a wide variety of workers,' the expert said. The so-called hazard review estimated that 20 million workers are affected by wildfire smoke. It included recommendations for keeping workers safe in smokey conditions, such as how to determine when air quality is unhealthy, when to shorten work shifts, and what types of masks or respirators are effective in smoke. The NIOSH team was working to finalize the document until its members were put on administrative leave. 'We were really prioritizing it with the intent of it being finished this year because we know these smoke events will keep coming,' the expert said. Though some staffers who are still at NIOSH have limited knowledge of respirators or smoke protections, none are qualified to finish the document, the person said. The stalled recommendations were cited by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, in a report this month that outlined how layoffs at NIOSH could hamper worker safety. Washington state is one of three states with regulations requiring employers to protect their workers from wildfire smoke. If the federal document isn't finalized, 'necessary revisions to the Washington wildfire Smoke Rule may not happen,' Murray's report said. Federal recommendations would also help California enforce its rules for keeping workers safe in smokey conditions, said Michael Méndez, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how wildfire smoke affects vineyard workers. The state law requires employers to take different steps depending on how bad the air is, based on an official air quality index. That can be 'ripe for misinformation, with employers telling workers it is safe to go out without a mask or keeping workers out there,' Méndez said. 'Having a finalized report, having NIOSH staff there to explain it to workers, to translate it into their language, that would be key to keeping workers safe,' he said.
Axios
23-04-2025
- Health
- Axios
Deaths at work decreased slightly in 2023: report
Fewer workers died on the job in 2023, though nearly 400 fatalities a day were still attributed to dangerous conditions, according to the latest installment of the AFL-CIO's annual health and safety report. The big picture: The findings, first shared with Axios, come as the Trump administration moves to eliminate nearly all roles at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's occupational safety arm and the only federal agency dedicated to researching worker health and safety, the union said. "The most recent policy decisions that we're seeing at the national level are only going to make the situation worse," said Rebecca Reindel, AFL-CIO's safety and health director. What they found: The 2023 job fatality rate in the U.S. was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers. That's down slightly from 3.7 deaths per 100,000 workers the prior year, per AFL-CIO's analysis of federal data. About 385 workers died each day in 2023 from hazardous working conditions. 5,283 workers died on the job throughout the year, and an estimated 135,304 people died from illnesses associated with their job functions. Black and Latino workers were more likely to have work-related deaths than their white counterparts, at 3.6 and 4.4 deaths per 100,000, respectively. More than one third of fatalities were among workers age 55 and older. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting jobs had the highest fatality rate (20.3 per 100,000), followed by mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction (16.9 per 100,000) At least 55 people died from heat exposure in 2023, a 28% increase from the year before. Between 2022 and 2023, unintentional drug overdoses fell nearly 5%, while workplace suicides increased 5.2%. Zoom out: The Health and Human Services Department reportedly eliminated 85% of roles within NIOSH earlier this month during its DOGE-led agency reorganization. The office's tasks include certifying masks that protect workers against harmful exposures, overseeing medical examinations for miners and 9/11 responders, and monitoring and researching workplace safety hazards. Republican lawmakers have started asking Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reverse the cuts. "I believe in the President's vision to right size our government, but I do not think eliminating the NIOSH coal programs and research will accomplish that goal," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito ( wrote to Kennedy on Monday. The AFL-CIO's report also says the administration's rollback of labor union protections and its unclear direction for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could hurt worker safety. Follow the money: Job injuries and illnesses cost the country somewhere between $174 billion to $348 billion annually, the union said. Financial penalties for workplace health and safety violations aren't high enough to hold employers accountable, Reindel said. Employers faced an average $4,083 fine for a serious federal violation in fiscal year 2024. The median penalty for killing a worker under federal regulations was $16,131.
