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Biomedical subjects

G Markowitz

Publications and source records attributed to G Markowitz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

"Cater to the children": the role of the lead industry in a public health tragedy, 1900-1955.

A major source of childhood lead poisoning, still a serious problem in the United States, is paint. The dangers of lead were known even in the 19th century, and the particular dangers to children were documented in the English-language literature as early as 1904. During the first decades of the 20th century, many other countries banned or restricted the use of lead paint for interior painting. Despite this knowledge, the lead industry in the United States did nothing to discourage the use of lead paint on interior walls and woodwork. In fact, beginning in the 1920s, the Lead Industries Association and its members conducted an intensive campaign to promote the use of paint containing white lead, even targeting children in their advertising. It was not until the 1950s that the industry, under increasing pressure, adopted a voluntary standard limiting the amount of lead in interior paints.

Advertising↗
PubMed1999

Labor Day and the war on workers.

We celebrate Labor Day every year with barbecues and picnics, rarely remembering that the holiday was born in the midst of tremendous labor struggles to improve working conditions. In the last century, 16-hour workdays and 6- and 7-day workweeks led to terribly high injury rates in the nation's mines and mills. Thousands upon thousands of workers died, caught in the grinding machinery of our growing industries. Today, despite improvements, thousands of workers still die in what has been described as a form of war on the American workforce. This commentary reminds us of the historical toll in lives and limbs that workers have paid to provide us with our modern prosperity. It also reminds us that the continuing toll is far too high and that workers who died and continue to die in order to produce our wealth deserve to be remembered and honored on this national holiday.

Accidents, Occupational↗
PubMed1998

Somatic inactivation of Pkd2 results in polycystic kidney disease.

Germline mutations in PKD2 cause autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. We have introduced a mutant exon 1 in tandem with the wild-type exon 1 at the mouse Pkd2 locus. This is an unstable allele that undergoes somatic inactivation by intragenic homologous recombination to produce a true null allele. Mice heterozygous and homozygous for this mutation, as well as Pkd+/- mice, develop polycystic kidney and liver lesions that are indistinguishable from the human phenotype. In all cases, renal cysts arise from renal tubular cells that lose the capacity to produce Pkd2 protein. Somatic loss of Pkd2 expression is both necessary and sufficient for renal cyst formation in ADPKD, suggesting that PKD2 occurs by a cellular recessive mechanism.

Alleles↗
PubMed1997

Race, foster care, and the politics of abandonment in New York City.

Following the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the sectarian system of foster care services in New York City practiced open discrimination. African-American children were generally segregated in a small number of overcrowded and understaffed all-Black institutions. As the African-American migration to the city accelerated in the years following the outbreak of World War II, a small group of psychologists, jurists, philanthropists, and social workers began a systematic challenge to this system. This paper explores the role of racism in shaping New York's foster care system and the experience of African-American children who were forced to depend on services originally organized to serve Whites. It also looks at the ways race affected the way children were typed--as mentally ill, delinquent, or even criminal--in response to the structural realities of a system that sorted children into separate types of institutions according to race. The paper also provides the background for understanding the landmark challenge to segregation of children in sectarian and public institutions represented by Wilder v Sugarman.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

The limits of thresholds: silica and the politics of science, 1935 to 1990.

Since the 1930s threshold limit values have been presented as an objectively established measure of US industrial safety. However, there have been important questions raised regarding the adequacy of these thresholds for protecting workers from silicosis. This paper explores the historical debates over silica threshold limit values and the intense political negotiation that accompanied their establishment. In the 1930s and early 1940s, a coalition of business, public health, insurance, and political interests formed in response to a widely perceived "silicosis crisis." Part of the resulting program aimed at containing the crisis was the establishment of threshold limit values. Yet silicosis cases continued to be documented. By the 1960s these cases had become the basis for a number of revisions to the thresholds. In the 1970s, following a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommendation to lower the threshold limit value for silica and to eliminate sand as an abrasive in blasting, industry fought attempts to make the existing values more stringent. This paper traces the process by which threshold limit values became part of a compromise between the health of workers and the economic interests of industry.

Health Personnel↗
PubMed1995

Workers, industry, and the control of information: silicosis and the Industrial Hygiene Foundation.

This essay focuses on the early history of industry and professional relationships around silicosis, the debilitating occupational lung disease, through a study of the role of the Industrial Health Foundation, an industry-sponsored group which has played a critical role in shaping the nation's agenda regarding industrial disease. From its start during the Depression, it has portrayed itself as an industry-sponsored agency that depended upon detached, disinterested professionals and experts to develop effective programs to address occupational disease. As an organization that brought together professional industrial hygienists, business groups, government officials, academics and researchers it serves as a means for understanding the intertwining of industrial and academic agendas. We explore some of the issues that arose regarding public policy and scientific investigations, asking: Under what conditions is it appropriate for professionals and scientists to work together with industrially sponsored organizations? What are the pressures that shape research questions, the range of possible solutions, and the control of scientific data? How can technically trained individuals avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest? At what point does the ostensibly disinterested goals of professionalism conflict with the self-interest of the sponsoring organizations?

Foundations↗
PubMed1991

Seeking common ground: a history of labor and Blue Cross.

In recent years, voluntary health insurance costs have become a major source of friction in labor-management negotiations. What was once a "fringe" has led to job actions, strikes, and intensive bargaining. We examine the history of labor's participation in New York Blue Cross from the 1930s to the recent past and show that labor's participation in the plan was crucial to Blue Cross's success in the plan's early decades. By the late 1950s, serious tensions developed over rate increases and the participation of labor in Blue Cross governance. Ultimately, the issue was one of the control over what was provided by the plans and who would pay for the costs of care. We posit that labor was never able to achieve an important role in the control of the third-party payer, and in the antilabor environment of the 1980s this proved detrimental to labor's interests.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance Plans↗
PubMed1989

The illusion of medical certainty: silicosis and the politics of industrial disability, 1930-1960.

No firm differentiation existed between social and medical standards on silicosis, the salient industrial health problem of the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, professional groups, government and labor officials, and insurance executives negotiated about the causes and consequences of the disabling condition. Debates in the 1930s formed the basis for amending state and federal compensation systems for work-related disease. If attention to silicosis declined after World War II, disputes continued about diagnosis and functional criteria for identifying pulmonary and occupationally based impairments, and about appropriate policies for treating and compensating people disabled through the course of their work.

Disability Evaluation↗
PubMed1986

More than economism: the politics of workers' safety and health, 1932-1947.

Even within the context of the New Deal, an agency of the Department of Labor was unusual for its innovations and activism. The Division of Labor Standards went beyond the economism of hours and wages to the advocacy of a safe and healthy work place. Unlike the Public Health Service, the division eschewed the "neutrality" of research and information gathering; it sought to intervene, directly and through the states, in the work place. The end of World War II unleashed a conservative reaction that restrained government's responsibility for several decades.

Environmental Exposure↗