Dept. Environmental Health News, Autumn 2002

Photo by Kris Freeman and Pacific Fishing magazine

Commercial fishing is one of the world’s deadly occupations. Yet fishers have shown reluctance to implement safety measures, even though their risk of injury is high, and the means to reduce risk are well known and have been proven effective.

Reporters and photographers view violence and trauma regularly, yet an unwritten code among journalists holds that no assignment, no matter how dangerous, can prevent them from taking a photograph, gathering facts, and producing a story.

Teenagers may be among the most resistant populations, combining inexperience with a sense of immortality.

Departmental outreach staff discussed the difficulties—and promises—of changing these work cultures in a poster session at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco in November.

Kris Freeman discussed the commercial fishing industry’s work culture of high risk. Fishers minimize their feelings of vulnerability through fatalism, denial, and a tendency to “blame the victim” for accidents. The largest improvements in commercial fishing safety have come from regulation or insurance requirements.

She described successful safety programs that draw on fishers’ business and problem-solving skills, and are congruent with the industry’s individualistic, competitive culture. A successful Norwegian program provided detailed cost-benefit analyses (for example, the cost of safety glasses vs. the cost of an eye injury at sea). Successful programs in the US have organized public safety-drill competitions among vessels, such as “survival suit races.”

Kathy Hall and Roger Simpson, an associate professor in the Department of Communication, describe how journalists and their employers give little attention to the potential effects of the violence they see. Indeed, the culture of daily journalism resists interventions such as those that have become common for public safety agencies.

Simpson and other researchers have found that journalists on the front lines are strikingly similar to public-safety workers in both their experiences and their emotional responses, yet they generally have little safety training or counseling to help them cope with traumatic events. Three exceptions—media organizations that have developed positive safety cultures—are Cable News Network (CNN), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and the New York Times.

Darren Linker, of the Health and Safety Awareness for Working Teens program, described an interactive Web site that can be used to teach health and safety to students in high school wood shop classes. They learn general safety principles they can use throughout their working life, plus specific instructions about safely using saws, drills, sanders, and other shop equipment.

The goal of the Web site, and of the Health and Safety Awareness program in general, is to educate students about workplace health and safety by promoting an attitude of occupational injury and illness prevention, Linker said.

Photo by Andrew Hendry