If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or need help, call 988 or message the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
Last week, we shared an interesting article from Axios about a workers’ comp study that found that behavioral health challenges that accompanied physical workplace injuries ended up keeping employees out of their jobs for almost 3x longer. Just 3% of injuries included behavioral or mental health challenges, but those made up over a third of total costs for employers. Injured workers with behavioral or mental health claims were also 3x more likely to use opioids. If you have an employee who was injured on the job, it may well be worth the investment to offer mental health services immediately, like covering the cost of talk therapy. Consider working with your HR and benefits teams to create options for injured workers to access mental or behavioral health care and making it a standard part of your worker’s comp process. Like EAPs, we suspect the majority of your injured workers won’t use them, but if it helps even one single employee, it could be worth it.
Source: Axios
If an employee has a cough that’s caused by allergies, they can generally work, though we always recommend that a manager use discretion; if someone has a really bad cough and doesn’t look well, your guests may not want to be served by them, for example. Allergies really can cause coughs, often a chronic, dry cough that can last for weeks. If a cough is new, wet, or hacking, or accompanied by other cold or flu symptoms, including fever, it’s more likely to be a cold or flu than seasonal allergies. But if it’s accompanied by itchy eyes and sneezing, it gets better with allergy medication, or if it lasts more than a week, it’s more likely to be allergies. Generally, if someone reports that their cough is due to allergies, we recommend that they be allowed to continue working.
Sources: ACAAI
There’s nothing businesses need to do right now about positive wastewater tests in Texas. The initial findings are certainly concerning in terms of just how widespread H5N1 may be on dairy farms, but they don’t necessarily mean much in terms of whether any humans are sick. Commercial farms produce a lot of waste, so it makes sense that nearby wastewater would test positive if they have sick cows. The initial results (which are not yet peer-reviewed) don’t show any genetic mutations that indicate that the virus is different from the one spreading between cows, nor that it’s specifically mutated to infect humans. What it does mean is that our initial estimates of just how many dairy cows might be infected could be even more of an underestimate than we thought. More wastewater testing results are on the way, and we’ll be eager to review them.