Did you know that skin cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in the United States? And, did you know that melanoma, which is responsible for 75% of all skin cancer deaths, is diagnosed in Oregon at a rate 36% higher than the national average?

Unprotected exposure to ultraviolet light is the most preventable risk factor for skin cancer, including melanoma, and early detection of melanoma can save lives. This is why CROET, the Knight Cancer Institute and the OHSU Department of Dermatology are participating in Don’t Fry Day. Don’t Fry Day, Friday May 24, is sponsored by the National Council on Skin Cancer Prevention and SunWise, a U.S. EPA health and environmental education program that teaches children and their caregivers how to protect themselves from overexposure to the sun. Don’t Fry Day occurs every Friday before Memorial Day.

Remember to Slip! Slop! Slap! and Wrap! when you’re outdoors. Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen of SPF 30 or higher, slap on a hat, and wrap on sunglasses. You can learn more about skin cancer prevention by visiting the Don’t Fry Day booth, located outside the Old Library at OHSU between 11 am and 2 pm this Friday!

For more information, please visit:

http://www2.epa.gov/sunwise/dont-fry-day

http://www2.epa.gov/sunwise

https://www.facebook.com/DontFryDay?v=app_254553244581393&rest=1

NIOSH Director Dr. John Howard led a Roundtable at the Work, Stress and Health 2013 Conference in LA focused on Total Worker Health (TWH) that discussed the issue that wellness programs can place a significant requirement on employees to achieve wellness goals.  Wellness programs need to be designed to support employee success and avoid using them to penalize employees who are in poor health or who have predispositions toward unhealthy lifestyles.  Two pictures from the Roundtable are shown below; members were from the VA, Disney, University of Georgia, a Workers’ Comp insurance company, and the Laborer’s fund of North America.

Later in the day a program that represented views from the Labor community returned to this issue of the potentially disproportionate burden of wellness programs on employees.  A Commentary by Dr. Schall of the University of California at Irvine proposed that companies need to include employees or their representatives as participants in the development of the wellness component of any TWH program, and to study such programs with community-based participatory research (CBPR), a category or research designed to include potential study participants in the planning of the research.  He concluded that incentives should only be used to stimulate participation in wellness programs, not to achieve change goals.

See yesterday’s post for more information on this conference.

The Work, Stress, and Health Conference (formally the 10th International Conference on Occupational Stress and Health) began today in LA. The conference is focused on Total Worker Health (TWH) which is the integration of occupational safety and health with wellness and wellbeing. Attendees are learning about recent research, and practitioners are attending to learn new ways to develop and implement TWH programs in the workplace. A picture of the audience at the opening session is shown below.

2013 Work-Stress-Health Conference on Total Worker Health (TWH) opens.

In the opening session, the keynote speaker (LaMontagne from Melbourne) summarized the research literature reporting the low but significant incidence of employees with poor mental health in the workplace. Stress is associated with depression that affects employees’ performance at work and of course also at home.  Some of that stress occurs at work.

This conference runs through Sunday. Several scientists from the Oregon Healthy WorkForce Center are attending and making presentations about their initial findings in pilot research conducted in the first year of the projects. More on that later.

For more information about TWH, see CROETweb topics.

SafeBuild Alliance May 2013 meeting.

Today while passing active commercial construction in the South Waterfront area of Portland, I thought about how lucky we are to have so many leaders working toward zero incidents in construction in our community. And even better to have an opportunity for construction to collaboratively promote their commitment towards safe performance.

I am continually impressed by the programs developed by our Oregon partner, SafeBuild Alliance – the newly minted name of what we’ve known as the non-profit Greater Portland Construction Partnership.  In addition to creating informative, “worth your time” programs and dialogues, it’s a unique opportunity to mix industry safety professionals with those involved in leadership at all levels to dialogue about how to achieve an incident-free construction industry.

The topic of this week’s May 8 meeting, Construction Work in Healthcare, was addressed by 5 representatives of major healthcare providers in Oregon with expertise in facilities maintenance, construction safety and infectious disease. Even those contractors working regularly in healthcare seemed to pick up on new and useful information during the evening.  I particularly appreciated the comments of my colleague Gene Patrick, OHSU Construction Safety Manager, as he shared the importance and challenge of maintaining healthcare’s mission of protecting patients during all construction activities in hospitals and healthcare facilities.

This is another positive Oregon example of collaboration. Although we have challenges, look at where we can go when we sit at a table together and share our experiences, even if we don’t agree on all the details or when we are competitors in the marketplace. If you have anything to do with construction in Oregon, your organization deserves to learn more about SafeBuild. Visit the SafeBuild Alliance website and follow SafeBuild on Twitter and FaceBook.

Resources:
CROET web topic: Construction
PSU/CROET archived webinar: Innovations in Safety Climate

OHSU’s Healthy Team Healthy U May 2013 Poster

Oregon Health and Science University is pleased to be one of dozens of Oregon organizations and companies participating in Safety Break for Oregon this year. While we believe in being safe every day, Safety Break allows us to join employers throughout our state to make a public statement about the importance of safety and health.

Here at CROET, the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center, and OHSU, we wanted to go one step further and address our efforts integrating safety and wellness in Total Worker Health. As we begin to move beyond conversations into initiatives integrating safety and worksite wellness, why not weave the Safety Break message into our wellness messages for employees? So this month’s Healthy Team Healthy U poster is just that. There is some evidence that being healthy lessens our risk of getting hurt at work. We are reminded that while we choose health by riding our bicycles or walking to work – to do it safely. We need to remember  that creating a better ergonomically designed work station or task will not only help prevent injuries at work, but allow us to continue doing the activities that we love outside work, which may in fact improve our overall work and life satisfaction.

Safety Break in Oregon is officially May 8, but the posters are up throughout OHSU now. And our challenge to you? Learn one thing that helps you improve your health and safety both on-the-job and off. We’d love to hear what you come up with!

Resources:
More about Healthy Team Healthy U
CROETweb: Total Worker Health and Wellness

CROET Director, Steve Shea (L) and John Mohlis, Executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council, at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem.

Oregon House Bill 2909 passed unanimously through the Oregon House last month and is about to be considered by the Oregon Senate. On April 29, Steven A. Shea, PhD, Director of CROET, and John Mohlis, Executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council and co-chair of the Oregon Management and Labor Advisory Committee, provided testimony in support of the bill to the Oregon Senate Business & Transportation Committee. That committee has now recommended to the Senate to pass the bill. If this bill passes the Senate, the name change will officially occur in the late summer, 2013.

The Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology (CROET) was established by the Oregon Legislature in 1985. CROET’s mission is to promote health and prevent disease and disability among working Oregonians and their families during their employment years and into retirement. The current name does not fully encompass all of CROET’s outreach, research and education activities. Changing CROET’s name to the broader “Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences” will more accurately describe the activities and vision of the center, potentially will help with obtaining research funding and with faculty recruitment, and will help the public more accurately recognize what we do.

A study published in the most recent version of the journal Obesity found that the body’s internal clock, the circadian system, increases hunger and cravings for sweet, starchy and salty foods in the evenings. While the urge to consume more in the evening may have helped our ancestors store energy to survive longer in times of food scarcity, in the current environment of high-calorie food, those late night snacks may result in significant weight gain.

“Of course, there are many factors that affect weight gain, principally diet and exercise, but the time of eating also has an effect. We found with this study that the internal circadian system also likely plays a role in today’s obesity epidemic because it intensifies hunger at night,” said CROET director Steven Shea, Ph.D., senior author on the study. “People who eat a lot in the evening, especially high-calorie foods and beverages, are more likely to be overweight or obese.”

Indeed, eating a lot in the evening can be counterproductive since the human body handles nutrients differently depending on the time of day. For example, sugar tolerance is impaired in the evening. Additionally, consuming more calories in the evening predisposes people to more energy storage; we simply don’t expend as much energy after an evening meal in comparison to morning meals. Furthermore, artificial light enables people to stay up later than they probably should and often people don’t get enough sleep. “If you stay up later, during a time when you’re hungrier for high-calorie foods, you’re more likely to eat during that time,” Shea said. “You then store energy and get less sleep, both of which contribute to weight gain.”

“If weight loss is a goal, it’s probably better to eat your larger, higher-calorie meals earlier in the day,” said Shea. “Knowing how your body operates will help you make better choices. Going to bed earlier, getting enough sleep and choosing lower-calorie foods rather than higher-calorie foods in the evening can all help with weight loss.”

Conducted by Shea and two Boston-area researchers, Frank Scheer, Ph.D. and Christopher Morris, Ph.D. of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the study examined the appetite and food preference of 12 healthy non-obese adults throughout a 13-day laboratory stay in very dim light in which all behaviors were scheduled, including timing of meals and sleep. Dr. Scheer, first author on the study, explained that “by the end of this long protocol, all of the participants’ meals and activities were spaced evenly across the day and night, allowing examination of the true internal circadian effects on appetite, while controlling for other effects on appetite including the amount of food recently consumed.”

The researchers found that the internal circadian system regulated hunger, with participants feeling the least hungry in the morning (8 a.m.) and most hungry in the evening (8 p.m.). Similar rhythms were found in appetite for types of food, such as sweet, starchy and salty, and the estimate of how much food participants could eat. The study concludes that the internal circadian system causes an evening peak in appetite that may promote larger, higher-calorie meals before the fasting period necessitated by sleep.

“Our study suggests that because of the internal circadian regulation of appetite, we have a natural tendency to skip breakfast in favor of larger meals in the evening. This pattern of food intake across the day is exactly what Sumo wrestlers do to gain weight” said Dr. Shea. “So, it seems likely that the internal circadian system helps with efficient food storage. While this may have been valuable throughout evolution, nowadays it is likely to contribute to the national epidemic of obesity“.

For more information, you can view Dr. Shea’s interview with KGW.

1st Place: Vinny Gasbarro with teacher Randy Carruthers and Austin Coburn of Salem Academy.

Those of us attending the 5th Annual 2013 O[yes] safety video contest screening and awards event yesterday were in for a rare treat!  Oregon high school students attended with friends, parents and teachers, joined by safety and health professionals and contest sponsors, to watch all 8 finalist videos on the large screen and capture the unveiling of winning videos. CROET is pleased to be part of this successful collaboration!

2nd Place: Milce Delgado Lopez and Daisy Abundez of Springfield High.

High school students were challenged to create videos that would inspire teens to do at least one thing differently to stay safe on the job. This quest seems particularly relevant on the eve of Workers Memorial Day. This year the videos were of the highest quality yet received, touching on themes ranging from supervisors asking teens to do things they aren’t trained to do, to reminders to co-workers on how to be safer. This year first place was awarded to Austin Coburn and Vinny Gasbarro from Salem Academy, who created original music and lyrics to address workplace safety in Safety: the Musical.

Students received cash prizes with matching prizes for their schools. All 8 finalist teams received gift cards. The finalist videos will be used by O[yes] in education and training programs. We encourage you to show them to your co-workers during your safety meetings!

Contest sponsors deserve thanks and kudos, including: Oregon OSHA, SAIF Corporation, CROET at Oregon Health and Science University, all 5 Oregon chapters of the American Society of Safety Engineers, Hoffman Construction, Central Oregon Safety & Health Association, the Labor Education and Research Center at University of Oregon, the SHARP Alliance, Oregon Health Authority, and SafeBuild Alliance. Thanks to Salem’s Northern Lights Theater for providing our venue.

What a terrific example of the power of collaboration! Read the press release. Learn more about O[yes] and join our efforts to protect young workers.

Watch the videos now! See more photos on facebook.

3rd Place: Parkrose High class.

Students’ Choice Award: St. Helens High.

Congratulations to Catherine L. of Bonny Slope Elementary School in Beaverton upon the selection of her poster as the top entry from Oregon in this year’s SHADE contest! Catherine’s entry resulted from CROET outreach into the schools.

The SHADE contest is a collaborative program between the SHADE Foundation of America and the Environmental Protection Agency’s SunWise Program. SHADE and SunWise sponsor this contest, along with other educational programs, in efforts to educate children, their families, and teachers about the dangers of unprotected sun exposures.

This topic is particularly relevant at CROET as we recognize sun exposure as both an occupational and non-occupational health hazard. Research in CROET’s Lloyd & McCullough Labs involves examining DNA repair mechanisms for agents including UV radiation. We recognize that a large part of our lifetime sun exposures are received during our youth, and applaud educational programs for young people that target how to reduce the risk of exposure and disease.

The national SHADE poster winner will be determined through online voting through May 7. Visit the SHADE Foundation website now to see all of the top state selections and vote for your favorite.

Resources:

CROETweb info on Sun Exposure
CROETweb info on Tanning Salons
EPA’s SunWise Program