NEW YORK (AP) — The explosion early on a June morning ignited a blaze that engulfed a New York City shop filled with motorized bicycles and their volatile lithium-ion batteries. Billowing smoke quickly killed four people asleep in apartments above the burning store. As the ubiquity of e-bikes has grown, so has the frequency of [...]
Food manufacturers who deliberately add sesame to products and include the ingredient on labels are not violating a new federal food allergy law, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said last week. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy group, had petitioned the FDA to halt an unintended consequence of [...]
Emergency call center workers say their centers are understaffed, struggling to fill vacancies and plagued by worker burnout, according to a national survey released earlier this week. The survey conducted by the National Emergency Number Association in conjunction with Carbyne, a cloud technology company focused on emergency services, polled about 850 workers from centers across [...]
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A half-century ago, the nation's top health experts urged the federal agency in charge of mine safety to adopt strict rules protecting miners from poisonous rock dust. The inaction since — fueled by denials and lobbying from coal and other industries — has contributed to the premature deaths of thousands of [...]
MIAMI (AP) — Dr. Alfonso Sabater pulled up two photos of Antonio Vento Carvajal's eyes. One showed cloudy scars covering both eyeballs. The other, taken after months of gene therapy given through eyedrops, revealed no scarring on either eye. Antonio, who's been legally blind for much of his 14 years, can see again. The teen [...]
Border Patrol does not have protocols for assessing medical needs of children with pre-existing conditions, according to an independent report made public earlier this week on the death of an 8-year-old girl from Panama who was in federal custody. The girl's death was "a preventable tragedy that resulted from" failures in "medical and custodial systems [...]
NEW YORK (AP) — The Biden administration last week moved to reduce children's exposure to lead, proposing stricter limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and child-care facilities. Declaring that "there is no safe level of lead," the administration estimates that the proposed rule would reduce lead exposure for approximately 250,000 to 500,000 [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is enforcing stricter limits on hydrofluorocarbons, highly potent greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air conditioners. A rule announced earlier this week imposes a 40 percent overall reduction in HFCs starting next year, part of a global phaseout designed to slow climate change. The rule aligns with a [...]
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Prandy Tavarez and his wife were expecting a baby when they bought a four-bedroom house in a well-kept neighborhood of century-old homes here. They got to work making it theirs, ripping off wallpaper, upgrading the electrical and replacing windows coated in paint that contained lead, a potent neurotoxin that can damage brain [...]
CHICAGO (AP) — Natural disasters can be dramatic — barreling hurricanes, building-toppling tornadoes — but heat is more deadly. Chicago learned that the hard way in 1995. That July, a weeklong heat wave that hit 106 degrees killed more than 700 people. Most of the deaths occurred in poor and majority black neighborhoods, where many [...]