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Forestry services work presents high risk for injury, illness, and fatality. How worker and employer views of workplace safety compare influences the strategies to address hazardous working conditions. Interviews with forestry services workers and employers revealed themes about occupational hazards and ways to prevent work-related injury. Workers identified hazards related to the social and natural environments, and injury prevention solutions focused on interventions beyond their control and based on employer responsibility. Employers characterized hazards within job task contexts and tied solutions to worker behaviors to improve job task performance. Discordance between worker and employer reports indicates inconsistent views about what safety measures should be provided and pursued to effectively reduce injury risk. Because many workers in the forest services industry are marginalized due to their immigrant documentation status and being racially/ethnically minoritized, power differentials between workers and employers can also influence how workplace safety and health measures are determined and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem: Transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) from infected pregnant individuals to the fetus or newborn occurs from 1.2% to 4.3%. Our aim was to determine the rate of positivity among newborns delivered to infected mothers during epochs of different variants predominance. Method of study: This is a single academic center retrospective cohort study where we reviewed the electronic health records of pregnant individuals who tested positive for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and their newborns from March 2020 through January 2022. Infants born to SARS‐CoV‐2‐positive mothers at the time of delivery or within 10 days of admission were tested for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection at 24–36 h of age. Results: A total of 195 mothers were positive at delivery or within 10 days of admission and had their newborns tested for SARS‐CoV‐2. Seven newborns (3.6%) were positive. All positive infants were asymptomatic and born to unvaccinated mothers. Newborn positivity for SARS‐CoV‐2 was highest during the Omicron epoch (9.4%, p =.01). Conclusion: Increasing positivity rate was seen during the Omicron variant predominance. This could be attributed to postnatal acquisition of the virus, as Omicron has been associated with higher transmissibility in older children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geochemical analyses applied to lake sedimentary records can reveal the history of pollution by metals and the effects of remedial efforts. Lakes provide ideal environments for geochemical studies because they have steady deposition of fine grained material suitable for fixation of pollutants. The Laurentian Great Lakes are the most studied system in this field, and they have well-preserved chronological profiles. To date, this important system has been considered in parts for inorganic geochemistry, hampering basin-wide conclusions regarding metal contamination. We filled spatial and temporal gaps in a comprehensive geochemical analysis of 11 sediment cores collected from all five Great Lakes. Hierarchical cluster analysis of all Great Lakes samples divided the metal analytes into five functional groups: (1) carbonate elements; (2) metals and oxides with diverse natural sources, including a subgroup of analytes known to be anthropogenically enriched (Cd, Pb, Sn, Zn, and Sb); (3) common crustal elements; (4) metals related to coal and nuclear power generation; and (5) all of the co-occurring rare earth elements. Two contamination indices (I geo and EF) applied to sedimentary metals indicated that Na, Co, Mn, Cd, Pb, Ta, and Cu were each, at some point during the Anthropocene, the most enriched metal pollutants in Great Lakes sediments. Land uses correlated with the metal analytes, such as increases in contaminant metals with the rise in catchment population and increases in carbonate elements (e.g. Ca) with agriculture. Certain contamination trends were observed basin-wide, such as for the atmospheric pollutant Pb, which followed a rise associated with fossil fuel combustion and a decline following the ban of leaded gasoline. Other trends were lake-specific, such as recent high concentrations of Na in Lake Superior, likely due to road salt applications, and a late-20th-century peak in Ca associated with algal whiting events in Lake Ontario. Some metals exceeded guidelines for sediment quality, in some cases prior to European settlement of the basin, indicating that a paleolimnological context is important for appropriate management of sediment contamination. The Great Lakes are sensitive to environmental changes such as pollution by metals, and it is clear that while there has been remedial success, results from the uppermost intervals of cores indicate ongoing problems., Competing Interests: The authors declare there are no competing interests., (©2020 Aliff et al.)