For health equity, location is important

Urban air quality sensors in Africa: Bringing out the best in urban sanitation, air quality detection, and street vendor epidemiology research in a rural area

Robert D. Bullitt was one of the first to document the link between race and pollution. His work showed how redlining had affected majority-Black communities with more contaminated air and water than their white neighbors were exposed to. People of color live on average in neighborhoods with higher surface heat than do non- white people because of historical policies. One result of these urban heat islands is that people who already have a higher risk of respiratory and heart disease end up living in environments that exacerbate those illnesses.

The Ghana Urban Air Quality Project started with one sensor in Cape Coast in May 2019, which Amegah paid for with his own money. By the end of its first year of operations, the group he founded had added two more. A team of about 60 air-quality sensors are in use in various parts of Africa. The project has also integrated 10 donated, regulatory-grade PM2.5 monitors into the network to check the accuracy of the low-cost sensors.

Population growth and industrialization are leading to a problem. The risk of heart and respiratory disease is increased by exposure to small aerosol particles. Ninety percent of premature deaths in low- and middle-income countries are caused by air pollution. The majority of the world’s population lived with air quality that was not in line with WHO guidelines.

Around the same time that Amegah went to the WHO meeting, relatively inexpensive air-pollution sensors began to hit the market. At just a few hundred dollars apiece, they are not as reliable as the more expensive regulatory monitors, but when carefully calibrated and combined into networks, they get the job done. Plus, their low cost makes it easier to distribute more of them to gather local data.

This sensor network is also advancing Amegah’s epidemiology research, which centers on the health of street vendors, who are exposed to high levels of emissions from aging cars and two-stroke motorcycle engines. The most vulnerable people in this community are women and children. A women spends up to 12 hours selling her wares and then cooks her meals at home with her young children. And the neighborhoods they live in are “the most polluted in the urban landscape,” Amegah says, the air filled with road dust and smoke from burning trash.

The data from the sensors in the schools, hospitals and traffic arenas is being used to connect the health outcomes of children and street vendors.

“Kofi’s on the cutting edge of the science,” says Richard E. Peltier, an environmental health scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has the whole package. He’s got the monitoring expertise, he’s got the chutzpah to set up the monitoring network, and he’s bringing it back to human health.”

Evaluating how windows can improve students’ well-being: How environmental and energy efficiency affect children’s learning, health, and social equity

As an architectural designer working in New York City, Erica Cochran Hameen was struck by how inequity had been built into the physical environment. Wealthy areas were lined with well-maintained public buildings, and schools in those districts had beautiful light and working doors. Many buildings in lower income neighborhoods were destroyed and public schools were far from parks and green spaces.

The mental and physical health, climate change, and race and social equity connections are often overlooked. The Green Building Alliance in Pittsburgh says thatErica is trying to make it visible, tangible and meaningful. Her research was innovative. Cramer says that talking about energy efficiency is abstract, but when people can see how energy use and environmental quality can impact kids’ learning and health, it becomes a different conversation.

Cochran Hameen pointed out the strong effect windows have on students’ well-being. “You need a certain amount of daylight for your circadian rhythms,” she says. That means large windows are better but only when they’re also equipped with shades to mitigate glare and heat on sunny days.

Other recommendations are pricier but pay off over time. In the US, schools spend more money on energy than on books and technology. During on-site evaluations, Cochran Hameen found that some schools’ HVAC systems set one temperature for the entire facility, so rooms with different uses, such as the gym and the math classrooms, were kept at the same temperature. When people opened windows they wasted a lot of energy. Upgrading can keep students alert while saving money.

Source: People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time

Building the future: connecting communities and scientists to the environmental impacts of abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo nation – A conversation with Cochran Hameen

Cochran Hameen has collaborated with computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon to make resource intensive evaluations accessible and affordable. She wants to scale up her work by developing a sensor-laden robot that can navigate a building. She says she wants to show people how beautiful architecture is and how can have a big impact on them.

In 1989 when Johnnye Lewis moved to New Mexico she learned about the history of the land. She took a job as a consultant for Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she helped study the ecological and health impacts of nuclear research. That work, along with her involvement in community efforts to reconstruct historic radiation-exposure doses during the nuclear era, led her to start attending community meetings. She listened to residents discuss their concerns about the aftereffects of the atomic bomb, which was developed nearby, as well as ongoing health impacts from uranium mining on Navajo Nation land. Lewis thought that politicians and scientists weren’t talking about the problems the same way and that tribal members were paying with their health.

Congress permitted companies to dig on tribal lands. At least 160,000 abandoned mines in the U.S. are still operating after decades of mining for metals. At high doses, uranium in drinking water can cause kidney damage, and exposure to contaminated air can lead to lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Preliminary results suggest that prenatal and early childhood exposure to uranium can impair neural development.

Lewis is connecting research with interventions that can help people immediately at the University of New Mexico METALS Superfund Research Center. Studies by scientists at the center found that arsenic and uranium can displace zinc in proteins that repair damaged DNA, which might increase cancer risk. Lewis’s group is testing if zinc supplements can improve people’s health.

Community members in the Red Water Pond Road area also helped Lewis and her team design the Navajo Birth Cohort Study, which followed pregnant women and their babies through the children’s first year of life, tracing their development, health and environmental exposure to toxic metals. As part of the National Institutes of Health’s ongoing National Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes initiative, the study was extended and will continue to track children.

Teracita (Terry) Keyanna, who grew up in Red Water Pond, says other scientists had informed them that the land was contaminated but then left without addressing the problem, something that has made it hard for residents to trust outsiders. Lewis has proved herself by working closely with those who have the most at stake. She “has developed that rapport with the community, and we trust her,” Keyanna says. “It’s taken a long time to do that.”

Lewis started out in community engagement, working on recycling and food co-op projects before returning to academics and specializing in toxicology. She says her background and her recognition of the interconnection between the environment and human health have helped her work with Indigenous communities. They’ve helped her to improve the science. “Science is a special training I have, but it should just be one piece coming to the table,” Lewis says.

While in San Francisco, Bourzac works as a journalist and writer for Nature, Science News, and other publications.

Source: People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time

Banana plantation pesticide hotspot mapping in Costa Rica: A case study of Berendina van Wendel de Joode

People living or working in the vicinity of a banana plantation in Costa Rica are exposed to high levels of pesticides. That’s because farmers don’t leave anything to chance. Every time a banana tree sprouts a leaf, it’s newly vulnerable to fungal infection, so farmers spray fungicide from crop dusters and enclose growing fruits in plastic bags loaded with insecticide to deter bugs.

Berendina van Wendel de Joode has been working to change that. In the 1990s she moved to Costa Rica to work on a study on the effects of paraquat on farmworkers. She returned to Costa Rica in 2004 and has been at the National University of Costa Rica ever since.

A large-scale study of 300 mother-child pairs in the Matina District of Limn Province is one of several projects by van Wendel de Joode. The project hopes to find out if factors such as a child’s distance from a plantation or parent working in agriculture lead to higher chemical exposure and how that affects overall health. So far early results have revealed that women with evidence of fungicide exposure during pregnancy had infants with more respiratory infections and impaired neurodevelopment at age one.

The Costa Rican government provided a community with clean water because of the research carried out by Van Wendel de Joode. After her work with agronomists showed that plastic fruit bags were just as effective against insect damage when treated with mustard or without any chemicals at all, growers began phasing out the insecticide-treated versions.

Van Wendel de Joode is building maps of aerial-pesticide hotspots to show which ones are near inhabited areas. A pilot program was started that will test a play-based learning program for those with pesticide-related delays.

The next generation of Costa Rican environmental epidemiologists is now being trained by van Wendel de Joode, says Ana Maria Mora, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Research and Community Health.

The Climate Crisis and Implications for Snakebite Envenomation in the Outskirts and Fields of the Central Amazonian Region

Snakebite envenomation is one of the deadliest tropical diseases. Like so many other conditions, it is most dangerous to the people with the fewest resources because they are least able to protect themselves from being bitten or to access the best care. New treatments could save lives and limbs.

The climate crisis is changing the range and prevalence of many diseases. Valley fever has expanded into new locations, and those working outdoors in construction sites and dusty agricultural fields are the most at risk. The illness also disproportionately affects Latino, Asian and Indigenous American people, who are more likely to contract it than white people and who often experience more severe symptoms.