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Donna
Puleio Spadaro, MD is a board certified oncologist practicing
in NW PA whose background and life experiences have lead to
activism for social and economic justice. Donna was born in 1960 in McKees Rocks, PA, a mill town
near
Pittsburgh
, the daughter of Donald Puleio, an elementary school educated
steelworker and member of the USW and Mary Stanko Puleio.
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Mary
Stanko was the first in her family to graduate high school.
Donna’s grandparents were European immigrants who worked in the
mines, mills and railroads of
Western PA.
Grandfather George
Stanko participated in the 1909 Pressed Steel Car Strike shortly
after his arrival in the
USA
.
Donna
graduated valedictorian from
Sto-Rox
High School
in 1978, the year her father died of gastric cancer after a life of
toil in the mills with the attendant exposure to carcinogens.
Donna received her Bachelor of Science in Chemical
Engineering from the
University
of
Pennsylvania
in 1982. She was able to attend Penn through a combination of
scholarships, grants and her deceased father’s Social Security
benefits. (Prior to Ronald Reagan slashing the program,
surviving children of deceased workers could collect Social
Security till age 22 if they were full time college students)
Donna
received her MD from the
University
Of
Pittsburgh School Of Medicine
in 1986, completed her Internal Medicine residency at Mercy Hospital
of Pittsburgh in 1989 and oncology fellowship at Allegheny General
Hospital of Pittsburgh by 1991, the year her mother died.
She has been in continuous fulltime practice in NW PA since
then. She is a single
parent to Maria, born in 1990, and Anthony born in 1991.
Donna
is the youngest of 4 siblings. On August 15, 2001, her brother Gary
Puleio, http://garypuleio.blogspot.com
was killed at
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Meadville
Redi-Mix Concrete after falling 25
feet from a concrete tower. OSHA accepted the implausible excuse
offered by Redi-Mix that
Gary
just "wandered up there on his own" at the end of the
driving shift rather than, as a new employee, being assigned the
dangerous task of cleaning the tower without any safety equipment.
Meadville Redi-Mix had been cited for numerous serious violations
only months before
Gary
was killed. For
Gary
’s death, Redi-Mix paid a $6000 fine for REPEAT violations and
accepted no wrongdoing.
Full
access to
Gary
’s case records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was
denied. The appeal to
obtain full access and to review the “substantive” issues of the
case was stalled for months. Finally, no further action could be
taken anyway as OSHA requires that any citations or penalties must
be issued within 6 months of an “alleged violation” as this
neglectful killing of a worker was called.
In
response to the unjust circumstances
surrounding her brother’s death, the inadequacies of the
regulatory system designed to protect workers, the lack of
accountability of corporations and the unbalanced scales of justice,
Donna chose to honor her brother by becoming active in Workers’
Memorial Day commemorations. Donna was a keynote speaker at
Allegheny County Labor Council’s Workers’ Memorial Day 2004 in
Pittsburgh
. She has served on the
committee since then. Donna hopes to a more active participant in
United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities (USMWF.ORG at
http://usmwf.org ) founded by
Tammy Miser after her brother, Shawn Boone was killed by unsafe
working conditions. She
participates in the movement for economic justice as an “associate
member” of the USW and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW
www.cluw.org ). She has
been published in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, the Meadville
Tribune and People’s World Weekly. She maintains a blog at http://workingclassmatters.com.
She is a long term member of Physicians for Social
Responsibility ( www.psr.org )
and to promote health care for all, she recently joined
Physicians for a National Health Program ( http://www.pnhp.org
)
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