The US government’s workplace safety watchdog wrongfully withheld data documenting years of toxic exposures to workers and its own inspectors, according to a federal court ruling. As a result, the world’s largest compendium of measurements of occupational exposures to toxic substances – more than 2 million analyses conducted during some 75,000 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) workplace inspections since 1979 – should now be available to researchers and policymakers. The 29 June 2007 federal court ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Dr Adam Finkel, a former chief regulator and regional administrator at OSHA from 1995-2003, and now a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a visiting professor at Princeton University. His career at OSHA came to an end after disclosing OSHA’s secret decision in 2002 not to offer medical testing to its own inspectors who had been exposed to beryllium dust.
