http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1773 http://dspace.mit.edu/retrieve/1237 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1773 Search the Channel search http://dspace.mit.edu/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38481 Title: Environmental Occupational Health Protection Laws <br/> <br/>Authors: Ashford, Nicholas; Caldart, Charles <br/> <br/>Abstract: The manufacturing, processing, and use of chemicals and materials in industrial, workplaces are often accompanied by environmental, health, and safety hazards and risks. Occupational and environmental factors cause or exacerbate major diseases of the respiratory, cardiovascular, reproductive, and nervous system and cause systemic poisoning and some cancers and birth defects. Occupational and environmental disease and injury place heavy economic and social burdens on workers, employers, citizens, and taxpayers. Government intervention to address those issues largely takes the form of regulatory standards promulgated under the authority of federal legislation. This chapter addresses the major regulatory systems (or “regimes”) designed to protect public and worker health from chemicals discharged from sources that pollute the air, water, ground, and/or workplace in the United States. The European Union and other developed countries use similar approaches. Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38480 Title: The Crisis in the U.S. and International Cancer Policy <br/> <br/>Authors: Epstein, Samuel; Ashford, Nicholas <br/> <br/>Abstract: The incidence of cancer in the United States and other major industrialized nations has escalated to epidemic proportions over recent decades, and greater increases are expected. While smoking is the single largest cause of cancer, the incidence of childhood cancers and a wide range of predominantly nonsmoking- related cancers in men and women has increased greatly. This modern epidemic does not reflect lack of resources of the U.S. cancer establishment, the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society; the NCI budget has increased 20-fold since passage of the 1971 National Cancer Act, while funding for research and public information on primary prevention remains minimal. The cancer establishment bears major responsibility for the cancer epidemic, due to its overwhelming fixation on damage control—screening, diagnosis, treatment, and related molecular research— and indifference to preventing a wide range of avoidable causes of cancer, other than faulty lifestyle, particularly smoking. This mindset is based on a discredited 1981 report by a prominent pro-industry epidemiologist, guesstimating that environmental and occupational exposures were responsible for only 5 percent of cancer mortality, even though a prior chemical industry report admitted that 20 percent was occupational in origin. This report still dominates public policy, despite overwhelming contrary scientific evidence on avoidable causes of cancer from involuntary exposures to a wide range of environmental carcinogens. Since 1998, the ACS has been planning to gain control of national cancer policy, now under federal authority. These plans, developed behind closed doors and under conditions of nontransparency, with recent well-intentioned but mistaken bipartisan Congressional support, pose a major and poorly reversible threat to cancer prevention and to winning the losing war against cancer. Mon, 29 Oct 2001 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38479 Title: Major Challenges To Engineering Education for Sustainable Development: What Has to Change to Make it Creative, Effective, and Acceptable to the Established Disciplines <br/> <br/>Authors: Ashford, Nicholas <br/> <br/>Abstract: Scholars and professionals committed to fostering sustainable development have urged a re-examination of the curriculum and the restructuring of research in engineering-focused institutions of higher learning. The focus is on engineering, more than on the natural and physical sciences or on social science, because the activities that drive the industrial state – the activities that implement scientific advance – are generally rooted in engineering. Moreover, engineers are known as ‘problem solvers’ and if economies are becoming unsustainable because of engineering, it is natural to ask whether engineering as an activity and as a profession can be re-directed toward achieving sustainable transformations. Of course, engineering can not do it alone; scientific as well as social and legal changes must occur as well. This paper addresses the challenges ahead, if this optimistic vision is to be more than wishful thinking. Following a treatment of the philosophical and intellectual foundations of technological, organizational, social, and pedagogical innovation necessary for sustainable transformations of existing institutions and mindsets, this paper ends by addressing the following themes and questions: (1) How can multi- and trans-disciplinary research and teaching coexist in a meaningful way in today’s university structures? (2) Does education relevant to sustainable development require its own protected incubating environment to survive, or will it otherwise be gobbled up and marginalized by attempting to instill it throughout the traditional curriculum and traditional disciplines? (3) How can difficulties in linking the needed teaching and research be overcome? (4) Even if there exist technical options to do so, how can it be made safe for courageous students to take educational paths different from traditional tracks? (5) What can we learn from comparative analysis of universities in different nations and environments? and (6) What roles can national and EU governments have in accelerating the needed changes? Wed, 29 Oct 2003 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38478 Title: Scientific, Ethical and Legal Challenges In Work-related Gentic Testing in the United States <br/> <br/>Authors: Ashford, Nicholas Fri, 29 Oct 2004 22:58:59 GMT