[Mining], in short, can do grave damage to the web of life on the face of the earth. But it is the men who go down into the pits who are most directly victimized.
S. David Freeman
Energy: The New Era, 1974
Urban Environmental Health
At the First World Congress on Health and Urban Environment, scientists from around the world found few clear-cut answers to the problems of health in the urban environment, but they did come to recognize that public, private, and government sectors need to work together if solutions are to be found. "Whatever the problem you talk about," said Leonard Duhl, a professor of public health and urban policy at the University of California at Berkeley, "it involves everyone else's business." Duhl was one of the scientific advisers to the congress, which was held 6-11 July 1998 in Madrid, Spain, and was arranged and supported by the Office of the Mayor of Madrid. Melinda Moore, associate director for global health at the National Center for Environmental Health (a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia) said, "I believe that hearing from people with various perspectives is absolutely critical for urban environmental health. And that is one area where the congress met its goals."
![Modern City](forumfigcity.JPG) |
City struggles. The First World Congress on Health and Urban Environment brought science to bear on the problems of pollution for people living in the world's metropolitan areas. |
About 800 people attended the meeting at Madrid's new showplace, Palacio Municipal de Congresos, on the outskirts of the city. A new subway line, which opened just a week before the congress, allowed delegates to travel to the sessions and tour the city without the need for personal cars. That undoubtedly pleased Domingo Jiminez-Beltran, executive director of the European Environmental Agency in Copenhagen, Denmark, who criticized the United States' approach to automobile pollution, which consists only of decreasing certain exhaust pollutants. He said that U.S. agencies have overlooked the issue of how the car itself causes pollution. "The automobile still has polluting exhausts, the vehicles cause noise pollution, [and] they interfere with public transportation, [thereby] reducing mass transportation's ability to effectively transport people," said Jiminez-Beltran.
Greg Goldstein, one of several attendees at the meeting from the Healthy Cities Programme of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, said questions of health and urban environment have become compartmentalized in government bureaucracies. He agreed that a major goal of the conference should be acceptance of the idea that health and quality of life have to be considered together, and said, "I'm hearing discussions of that here." While there aren't many case studies in which people with various perspectives on urban priorities have worked together, Goldstein did cite some examples. For instance, Chittagong, Bangladesh, a city of nearly 3 million, turned itself from an environmental black hole noted for its squalor into a tourist destination in less than a decade. The area had poor plumbing, nonexistent sanitation facilities, and little in the way of public transportation or other facilities. Small neighborhood organizations worked in one area after another to clean up the city and develop a growing tourism industry in an area that was previously purposely bypassed by tourists. The city now boasts its own attractions and earns tourist dollars. Moore, however, criticized many speakers for presenting success stories without relating the details of how those accomplishments were achieved.
Goldstein said the congress seemed to emphasize the re-emergence of the city-state (as opposed to a federal government) as a way to deal with myriad urban problems. "I don't buy the idea that we don't know how to do it," he said, stating that because cities know best how to tackle local problems--compared to a federal government, which has to oversee numerous cities and rural areas with diverse needs--they are sometimes better at working things out on their own. For example, Goldstein said, the host city of Madrid has tackled its urban problems and the results can be seen in the lack of major traffic jams (due to a smoothly running transit system and huge underground parking lots that prevent drivers from having to circle blocks looking for parking spaces) and a distinct lack of slum areas. He also cited San Francisco as another city that is trying to solve its urban problems on its own, even to the extent of negotiating separate trade agreements with foreign governments.
One urban environmental problem that the conference ignored was the possible role of endocrine disrupting pollutants in health problems. "There has been a lot of interest in falling sperm counts in [city dwellers] and the role of endocrine disruptors," Goldstein said, "but that area needs more research. . . . Other issues of food safety and healthy food markets in cities are now considered much bigger issues." Moore added that the jury is still out on the issue of endocrine disruptors. "There seems to be strong evidence on both sides as to whether they have an impact on environmental health," she said.
Moore said the general consensus was that the conference was a good beginning in answering the many questions on health and the urban environment. The next congress is planned for July 2000, and may be hosted by Brazil.
Microbes Mediate Mining Metals
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have completed the first in situ molecular-level study of microbes that mediate toxic pollutants associated with sulfide mining. Tracking the volume and distribution of bacteria in an abandoned California mine, they may have found a better way to predict the potential environmental consequences of mining metallic sulfide ores.
One of the harshest environmental effects of sulfide mining is acid mine drainage (AMD), in which sulfuric acid flows into groundwater and surface water from metallic ore mines, releasing and suspending potentially toxic heavy metals in the water. In nature, sulfuric acid forms when minerals are exposed to oxygen and water; in mines, when pyrite and other sulfide minerals are exposed to oxygen and water in the surfaces of tailings and ore bodies, they oxidize to create ferrous and sulfuric acid. Catalyzed by naturally occurring bacteria, the ferrous ions react further with oxygen, producing a hydrated iron oxide called "yellowboy." Yellowboy and sulfuric acid may lower the pH of local soil, groundwater, and surface water, creating an unpredictable and potentially severe reaction. Two species of bacteria--Thiobacillus ferrooxidans and Leptospirillum ferrooxidans--have traditionally been thought to be the main microbes involved in accelerating AMD.
Bathing the earth in acid. New research on the role of bacteria in accelerating acid mine drainage may help researchers predict the release of sulfuric acid and hydrated iron oxide from industrial mining sites, thus allowing them to take preventive actions to protect the environment.
Source: Joe Zambelli/WV Department of Environmental Protection
AMD can be a big problem at abandoned mine sites. A 1993 U.S. Forest Service survey, Acid Mine Drainage from Mines on National Forests: A Management Challenge, estimated that up to 10,000 miles of domestic streams and rivers are affected by AMD, which makes the waters corrosive and harmful to some animal and plant life. Drainage water can also carry toxic metal-bearing sediment into streams. According to the 1994 Technical Document/Background for EPA Reviews: Non-Coal Mining Operations, prepared by the EPA's Office of Solid Waste, AMD can jeopardize surface water and groundwater quality and other resources during active mining and for decades after operations cease.
The UW-Madison study was conducted at an abandoned iron mine in Iron Mountain, California. The results, produced using molecular biology techniques to assess population dynamics of the microbes in the wild, suggest that contrary to earlier beliefs, L. ferrooxidans is a bigger contributor than T. ferrooxidans to mine pollution. The findings could give the mining industry and others a new predictive tool for estimating AMD from a given industrial site.
Mining at Iron Mountain was done in above-ground pits and in the tunnels. The Wisconsin team explored AMD under geochemical conditions in both environments. Results showed that T. ferrooxidans prefers moderate temperatures and lower acidity levels, whereas L. ferrooxidans survives at much higher temperatures and acid concentrations. This suggests L. ferrooxidans has a bigger role in accelerating AMD because its chances of coming in contact with the ore body are greater.
Researchers were surprised to find that T. ferrooxidans isn't the predominant player it was presumed to be; in fact, inside the mine, where most AMD occurs, it's essentially undetectable. L. ferrooxidans is far more present in the mine, where it makes up as much as 50% of the microbe species found in the mine's miles of underground tunnels.
"One interesting aspect of the work," says study coauthor and UW-Madison chemistry professor Robert Hamers, "is that the bacteria are finely tuned to their specific environments. I suspect similar bacteria are present in other mines as well, but I can't make a global statement to that effect. Temperature, pH, and metal concentrations all could affect the bacteria. In fact, we know there are seasonal variations." Hamers continues, "It is believed that most bacteria found in these extreme environments derive at least part of their metabolic energy by oxidizing iron from a 2+ oxidation state [ferrous ion] to a 3+ oxidation state [ferric ion]. The bacteria produces iron 3+, a strong oxidizing agent that can dissolve the mineral and liberate even more iron 2+. So bacteria and minerals are part of a cycle--the bacteria derive energy from oxidizing iron, and iron dissolves the minerals and becomes reduced in the process. This acts as more food for the [bacteria], and the process continues. Some bacteria may also be able to derive energy by oxidizing sulfur."
Finally, says Hamers, "One aspect that's still controversial is whether the bacteria actually attach themselves to the mineral surface, or whether the interaction occurs remotely through the ferric and ferrous ions." The researchers still have many questions about these other mine-dwelling bacteria, such as what they are, whether they are related to previously known bacteria or whether they represent a new genus or species, and how they tolerate such extreme metal concentrations and pH levels.
As for the UW-Madison study results, Hamers says the question now is whether the microbes offer any real predictive ability at the present time. "People are not able to accurately predict in a quantitative way the rates at which acid mine drainage is formed," he says. "Part of the problem is that the importance of bacteria in creating the acidic drainage has only been recognized fairly recently, and the types of bacteria present depend on several local factors. However, if all of these [factors] are known, then perhaps it will be possible to better predict--scientifically--the effects."
Hamers says such metal-tolerant bacteria have potential use as removers or oxidizers of certain types of hazardous metals from the environment. It might even be possible, he adds, to genetically engineer bacteria to selectively oxidize particular metals or to work their chemistry under beneficial circumstances. This is good news; because the process of remediating AMD is so damaging and expensive, predictive tools, design performance, financial assurance, and monitoring are increasingly important in the mining industry.
TB: New Research on An Old Disease
Tuberculosis, which currently infects one-third of the world's population, claims more lives annually than any other infectious disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 8 million people become infected and 3 million die from tuberculosis each year.
Tuberculosis spreads when infected people cough and sneeze, and others inhale infectious droplets circulating in the air. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis microbe lodges in the lung, producing symptoms including coughing (sometimes bloody), chest pain, fever, and weight loss. In the past few decades, outbreaks of tuberculosis have been reported in hospitals, prisons, schools, homeless shelters, bars, and factories, and passengers on commercial airlines have been infected by neighboring travelers and recirculating air.
As the number of new cases rises, so does M. tuberculosis's resistance to antibiotics. A four-year study involving 35 countries, reported in the 4 June 1998 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that 36% of tuberculosis patients treated for less than a month harbor microbes resistant to at least one of the four main antibiotics used to fight the disease. According to the report, patients need to take all four antibiotics (isoniazid, streptomycin, rifampin, and ethambutol) for two months, then continue two drugs for another four months for the therapy to be successful. However, many patients fail to comply with the lengthy treatment and help to spawn drug-resistant microbes that are immune to treatment.
A chronic culprit. Despite advances in science, tuberculosis continues to plague the modern world. New understanding may help researchers apprehend this infectious disease.
Source: Clifton Barry
Several recent scientific breakthroughs may, however, turn the tide in the battle against tuberculosis. An international team led by Stewart Cole of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and Best Barrell of the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Cambridge, United Kingdom, sequenced the bacterium's 4,000 genes, and published the results in the 11 June 1998 issue of Nature. The findings provide clues to the bacterium's defense mechanisms. For example, at least 250 diverse genes of the bacterium are devoted to lipid metabolism, more than any other bacterium sequenced. This suggests that M. tuberculosis digests lipids from host cells, then uses these lipids in its own cell wall, which is notoriously impermeable to many antibiotics. "All those enzymes, and particularly those that let [the microbe] use host membrane lipids as starting materials, are important drug targets," says Clifton Barry, head of the tuberculosis section at the NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, and a coauthor of the report.
In a separate project, Barry identified a molecular target of isoniazid, the most widely used antibiotic for tuberculosis. Although isoniazid treatment dates back to the 1950s, no one knows exactly how it works or why some tuberculosis strains grow resistant to it. But Barry and his colleagues reported in the 5 June 1998 issue of Science that isoniazid attacks the enzyme KasA (beta-ketoacyl-acyl carrier protein synthase) needed to synthesize mycolic acid for the bacterium's cell wall.
The KasA findings form the basis of a new assay for screening tuberculosis drug candidates. A reporter luciferase gene that glows when a drug effectively attacks KasA was added to an enzyme that increases when treated with isoniazid; the light production is easier to measure than the enzyme activity. Barry, now an investigator at the NIH's Laboratory of Host Defenses in Bethesda, Maryland, and researchers at Pharmacopeia in Princeton, New Jersey, are screening millions of potential antituberculosis compounds.
A new tool that produces large numbers of mutants of M. tuberculosis provides another method for advancing new drugs and vaccines. Generally, mutants provide insights into a microbe's survival, route of infection, and drug targets. However, the lack of tools for manipulating the M. tuberculosis genome, such as an efficient delivery system, has hindered progress with standard gene-modifying agents such as transposons.
Scientists William R. Jacobs and Barry R. Bloom of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, have developed a new vector, called a "shuttle phasmid," to make mutants of M. tuberculosis. The shuttle phasmid combines a mycobacteriophage (a virus that infects mycobacteria) with an Escherichia coli plasmid. The shuttle phasmid efficiently carries transposons inside M. tuberculosis cells, generating large numbers of mutations. The construction of the shuttle phasmid was described in the September 1997 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since then, the researchers have collected more than 10,000 mutants with a random distribution of mutations. "We keep making them, and hopefully we will statistically accumulate enough to cover all the genes," says Bloom.
The shuttle phasmid attracted the attention of Glaxo Wellcome in Stevenage, United Kingdom. On World TB Day (24 March 1998), Jacobs and Bloom (who recently moved to Harvard) were named scientific collaborators with Action TB, a Glaxo Wellcome initiative aimed at finding new treatments. "We need new drugs that are much better than existing treatments, and a vaccine to replace [the current one]," says Ken Duncan, Action TB program manager. "The mutants generated by shuttle phasmids can be used to identify genes involved in the infectious process and find attenuated strains as possible vaccine candidates."
The State of the World's Health
If navigating the world of environmental health seems a daunting challenge, you're in luck: World Resources 1998-99: A Guide to the Global Environment, released last July, provides a veritable atlas of the myriad issues, themes, and factors in today's environmental health landscape. The report is the eighth in a biennial series published jointly by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank. Each report studies a set of trends within one facet of the global environmental. Past editions of the report have concentrated on global climate change, sustainable development, population and natural resources consumption, and the urban environment.
The eighth edition explores how changes in the environment relate to human health. According to the report, a number of avoidable environmental factors that contribute to adverse human health effects are caused by changes wrought by human hands upon the environment and its ecosystems. In the underdeveloped world, these contributing factors include many of the "usual suspects" among health threats, such as the contaminated drinking water (attributable to lack of sanitation) that contributes to 7% of all deaths and disease worldwide. In developing nations, the very economic growth that energizes those nations also often threatens their citizens' health. Unchecked and unregulated development of highways, dams, factories, and agricultural enterprises creates not only energy and crops but also pollution and land degradation.
"Experience has shown," states the report, "that it is possible to manage economic growth in ways that preserve environmental quality and enhance human health. But this will not come from random interaction of market forces alone. Achieving the benefits of economic development while minimizing its deleterious impacts will require an increased awareness of links between environmental health and a broader approach to strategies to improve public health." The eighth report seeks to provide such increased awareness and offer ideas on new strategies to meet the public health challenges faced by both developed and developing nations.
Part I of the report presents an overview of the current state of the world's health, and discusses the diverse factors that influence environmental health, such as urban development, population, natural resources, and poverty. The report describes indicators recently developed by the WRI for measuring the presence of environmental health threats. Separate indicators were devised for developing and developed countries, based on the idea that people in developing nations are generally exposed to a broader spectrum of harmful agents via air, water, and food than are those in developed nations, who, the report claims, are primarily affected by the narrower band of health threats attributable to industrial pollution. These indicators are still only rough, preliminary gauges for ranking nations in terms of exposures to environmental health threats, but they may suggest areas where policy changes could turn the tide toward improving both environmental quality and human health.
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Not just hard to breathe. New evidence suggests that the lungs aren't the only organ affected by particulate matter; exposure could lead to cardiac problems for some people. |
The report also evaluates three trends--the intensification of agriculture, the rise in industrialization, and the increase in energy use--that have demonstrated a particularly harsh effect on the global environment, and examines the risks and complications involved in each trend. The report points out that predicting the health effects stemming from such trends isn't a simple matter. For instance, says the report, while irrigated land is far more productive than rain-watered fields, the canals and reservoirs necessary for the success of this method also provide hospitable breeding grounds that result in increased populations of the vectors of such diseases as malaria, schistosomiasis, and onchocerciasis.
The report diagrams the costs and benefits of several options for protecting both environmental quality and human health. On a local level, for instance, subsidization of home improvements for low-income families in order to free their homes of the reduviid bug that spreads Chagas' disease may provide a cost-effective alternative to applying pesticides. On a global level, the immediate threat of some environment-related diseases such as onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis is being reduced, thanks to programs through which pharmaceutical companies provide free drugs for treating these illnesses.
Part I also includes a collection of guest commentaries written by professors, scientists, and policy makers on topics such as environmental justice, breast cancer and the environment, and environmental health challenges of the 21st century. The section ends with environmental profiles of the Senegal River Basin and China, which illustrate the issues explored earlier in the chapter.
The latter two portions of the report provide short reports on emerging issues in world environmental health, including two new sections introduced in Part II. Global Environmental Trends contains updates on several subtopics grouped under the broad areas of population and general human well-being, world food supplies, production and consumption patterns, global effects of environmental degradation, and threats to the world's physical and biological resources. The section covers extensive ground, with reports on such issues as fertility rates, the boom in aquaculture, acid rain, energy emissions, and worldwide aquatic and terrestrial bioinvasions. Future editions of the report will use this section to report on the dominant issues of the day. The other new section, Regions at a Glance, spotlights the foremost trends in environmental health, grouped by world geographic regions. Part III, Data Tables, provides the latest data and statistics from 157 countries on economic indicators, population, health trends, forest and ocean health, and energy, as well as new information on poverty, socioeconomic inequality, and food security.
A PMatter of the Heart
An emerging body of evidence suggests that exposure to fine airborne particulate matter (PM)--ubiquitous air pollutants typically produced by combustion of fossil fuels--could lead to cardiac problems in some segments of the population, particularly the elderly and those with underlying conditions such as coronary and respiratory disease. These findings have surprised some researchers, who traditionally associated particulate toxicity only with respiratory effects. Fine particulates have been of particular concern because their small size enables them to penetrate deep into the tissues of the lung, where they can cause a variety of health problems. If validated, the recent findings could further support the EPA's 1997 decision to set its National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), a move for which the agency has been sharply criticized by the regulated community.
According to Daniel Greenbaum, president of the Health Effects Institute (HEI), an independent research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, epidemiologists first suspected that PM might be linked to heart problems when they saw elevations in mortality shortly after transient increases in ambient PM. "If PM is causing these short-term increases in deaths, there has to be a mechanism by which these sudden deaths are triggered," says Greenbaum, "and it was not at all illogical to think of cardiac effects as one possible explanation." Initial results of studies suggesting an association between PM exposure and cardiac effects were presented at the HEI's 14th annual conference, held in April of this year.
Hospitals often record the cause of death in elderly or otherwise sick individuals according to their underlying conditions rather than to a specific trigger such as cardiac arrhythmia. For this reason, it can be difficult for epidemiologists to correlate increases in morbidity due to cardiac problems occurring during periods of elevated ambient PM. A number of researchers are therefore focusing their efforts on unraveling this possible association using experimental animals. In order to mimic the effect seen among susceptible humans, many of these studies employ the use of "compromised" animal models, whereby coronary or respiratory disease is artificially induced prior to exposure.
John Godleski, an associate professor of pathology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, has found that exposure to PM at levels similar to those found in downtown Boston can increase heart rates in cardiovascularly compromised dogs. Interestingly, Godleski has found that elevated heart rates don't appear to correlate with increasing PM concentrations, leading him to speculate that some unknown components of the particulate load may be responsible for effects on heart function. "Total mass does not appear to be a good predictor of effect," he says. "It seems to be dependent upon what's in the air, which changes from day to day. Any number of factors could contribute to the composition of the aerosol. We need to do a lot more experiments to find relationships during similar kinds of days."
Research conducted in the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, has also yielded evidence of cardiac toxicity in animals exposed via intratracheal methods that deposit the PM directly into lung tissue. "In our studies, mortality was significant and preceded by malfunctioning of the heart," says Daniel Costa, chief of the pulmonary toxicology branch at the NHEERL. "We followed electrical events associated with heart malfunction right to the death of the animal."
A number of mechanisms by which PM could lead to cardiac effects are currently being explored. Godleski suggests that the effect could be part of a generalized inflammatory response, noting that inflammatory mediators such as tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-8, and other cytokines are able to induce arrhythmia in cultured heart cells. According to Greenbaum, other mechanisms may involve toxic effects of transitional metals, as well as the effects of acidic aerosols and allergic reactions to organic chemicals in the PM.
In a major study recently undertaken by the EPA, researchers are investigating cardiopulmonary responses to PM among a group of elderly residents in a retirement community in Towson, Maryland. The study is being undertaken by the NHEERL and the National Exposure Research Laboratory, also headquartered in Research Triangle Park. John Creason, a biostatistician with the epidemiology and biomarkers branch of the Human Studies Division at the NHEERL and a principle investigator of the study, says his research team will closely monitor heart rate variability (considered an excellent measure of the health of the heart) as a function of ambient PM exposure. During a pilot study conducted in February 1997, NHEERL researchers found that PM exposure depressed heart rate variability in elderly subjects with underlying cardiopulmonary disease.
The EPA is taking the threat of cardiac effects from PM exposure seriously. According to John Bachmann, associate director for science policy at the EPA Office of Air Quality, Planning, and Standards, over $8 million was appropriated to the EPA by Congress in Fiscal Year 1998 to set up a series of centers for the study of the health effects of particulate exposures. "This area of cardiovascular effects is one of the hot topics, certainly one of major interest," he says. The results of the current research programs will be published and reviewed by the public and by the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee prior to the reassessment of the ambient air standard for PM2.5 that is scheduled for 2002.
"As a regulator, I find this to be an exciting time," says Bachmann. "This is [epidemiology]-inspired toxicology, and toxicology-inspired epidemiology. We expect the new toxicology work and the new insights with respect to mechanism to be very important during our review of the standard."
In 1977, Congress enacted the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act (or Mine Act) to provide improved work conditions and practices in U.S. mines in order to reduce mining-related deaths, injuries, and occupational diseases. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), then four years old and newly rechristened, was entrusted with the congressionally mandated mission. Today, the administration inspects approximately 1,700 underground mines four times each year and 12,600 surface mines twice each year to ensure compliance with federal safety and health standards. MSHA also endorses rigorous education as a means of promoting mine safety, and the MSHA home page, found at http://www.msha.gov, offers a modern-day medium for meeting an age-old safety challenge.
The home page features a series of special alert bulletins, which keep readers apprised of product recalls and expirations, MSHA policy updates, and case studies of mining accidents, along with information on how such accidents can be avoided in the future. The Safety & Health Information link leads to a menu of specialized health information options, including links to health and safety bulletins, equipment safety, rescue techniques, and technical reports. The Statistics link accesses summaries of fatality, accident, injury, illness, employment, and production statistics that are broken out geographically and temporally. This link also leads to a number of reports, such as the MSHA Inspector Dust Sampling Results for Metal and Nonmetal Mines, which summarizes a five-year study on exposures to mining dusts and particulates.
The Fatality Information link goes to a page of accident investigation reports and "fatalgrams," bulletins intended to alert the mining industry to deaths in coal, metal, and nonmetal mines. Each fatalgram includes a list of "best practices" that might have prevented the accident. MSHA hopes these bulletins will lead to increased safety awareness among miners, mine administrators, and mining organizations, and encourages readers to distribute the fatalgrams. Back at the home page, the FOIA Reading Room link offers quick access to MSHA handbooks, manuals, policies, procedural instructions, and petitions for modification to existing policies. Also featured on the home page is information about the steps MSHA is taking to combat pneumoconiosis, a widespread but eradicable disease among miners.
The MSHA home page includes plenty of contact and background information. The District Home Pages link allows viewers to reach the MSHA district offices that have Web sites. Because many of the district offices are not yet online, the home page also offers a Mine Emergency Numbers link, which lists a toll-free number for notifying MSHA of a mine accident or emergency. The Statutory & Regulatory Information link offers a direct route to the legislation behind the administration, including text files for the Mine Act, pertinent sections of the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register, and MSHA publications. The Media Information link leads to transcripts of news releases, special reports, speeches, and congressional testimony issued by MSHA. Finally, the MSHA . . . Some Information link outlines the nuts and bolts of MSHA, including its mission statement, statutory functions, organizational chart, and history.
MSHA's educational efforts don't stop with the miners themselves. The Education & Training link on the home page provides information on scholarships, state grants, and mining safety training programs for MSHA employees as well as other federal and state mining industry and labor organization personnel. The Employment Opportunities link allows users to access job opening databanks for the Department of Labor, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and state and private bodies. And the Our Page for Kids link contains educational materials geared towards children, including a "cyber-prospecting" page and explicit warnings about why mines, quarries, and gravel pits definitely aren't good places to play.
Last Updated: October 29, 1998