OSHA will host and participate in local events and activities around the country to help keep teenagers safe and healthy on the job.  Activities include career fairs, youth programs, expos, career days and training seminars.  OSHA and its regional partners are striving to reduce work-related injuries among teens by teaching them on-the-job safety and integration of principles into their work tasks from this early age.  Through working with many strong national and regional Alliance Program participants and other cooperative programs, OSHA plans to reach more than three million teens.

Workplaces are safer than they have ever been with fatality and injury and illness rates declining to record lows in this administration.  The injury and illness rate was 4.4 per 100 employees and the work-related fatality rate was 4.0 fatalities per 100,000 employees in 2006, the latest data available.  Since OSHA's inception in 1971, U.S. employment has increased from 56 million employees at 3.5 million worksites to more than 135 million employees at 8.9 million worksites.

"Programs like the Teen Summer Job Safety Campaign help create a culture of safety," said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Edwin G. Foulke Jr.  "Our goal is to continue to drive down the number of occupational injuries among teens, especially in the construction industry."

The statement is from the association's Emergency Cardiovascular Care committee and was published in Circulation, the AHA journal.  "Bystanders who witness the sudden collapse of an adult should immediately call 9-1-1 and start what we call Hands-Only CPR.  This involves providing high-quality chest compressions by pushing hard and fast in the middle of the victim's chest, without stopping until emergency medical services responders arrive," Dr. Michael Sayre, chair of the statement writing committee and associate professor in the Ohio State University Department of Emergency Medicine, said in a release posted on AHA's Web site.

About 310,000 adults in the United States die each year from sudden cardiac arrest. Immediate, effective CPR from a bystander is needed or the person's chance of surviving decreases by 7-10 percent per minute.  AHA said on average, fewer than one-third of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims receive bystander CPR, which can double or triple a person's chance of surviving.  "Many times, people nearby don't help because they're afraid that they will hurt the victim and aren't confident in what they're doing," Sayre said.  "We want people to know that they can help many victims just by calling 9-1-1 and doing chest compressions.  Don't be afraid to try it.  We are sure many lives will be saved if the public does Hands-Only CPR for adult victims of sudden cardiac arrest."

The new recommendation is an update to the 2005 American Heart Association Guidelines for CPR and ECC, which previously recommended that lay rescuers use compression-only CPR only if they were unable or unwilling to provide breaths.

The overall 2006 fatality rate was revised from 3.9 percent per 100,000 employed workers to 4.0 per 100,000.

"We must not forget that these are not just numbers -- we're talking about real people, and for every workplace death in this country, there is a family somewhere that is grieving," Miller said in a release posted on his committee's Web site.  "The fact that things are going in the wrong direction is deeply disturbing.  The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Labor need to do a better job of enforcing our nation's health and safety laws.  There is no substitute for strong enforcement of the law, especially if we want to protect those workers who perform the most dangerous jobs and those workers who are the most vulnerable to exploitation."

The number of workplace deaths involving foreign-born workers rose from 997 to 1,046 because of the revision, and fatalities involving Latino workers rose from 937 to 990, representing a rate of 5.0 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2006 versus a rate of 4.7 in 2005.  Miller said his committee will hold a hearing next month on workplace injury, illness, and fatality numbers.

• May 5, 2008 - (am) Fall Protection Scaffold Training
• May 5, 2008 - (pm) Trenching, Shoring and Excavation Training
• May 7 & 8, 2008 - 10 Hour OSHA Construction Training
• May 8 & 9, 2008 - 10 Hour OSHA General Industry Training
• May 14, 2008 - 8 Hour Hazwoper Refresher Training
• May 29, 2008 - OSHA "Electrical Safe Work Practices, Sub-part S & Consensus Standard NFPA 70E"
• June 6, 2008 - (am) Incident Investigation Training
• June 6, 2008 - (pm) Safety Audits
• June 12, 2008 - (am) Machine Guarding Safety Training
• June 12, 2008 - (pm) "Getting to Zero" Safety Course