Extreme heat is a public health challenge. The scarcity of directly comparable studies on the association of heat with morbidity and mortality and the inconsistent identification of threshold temperatures for severe impacts hampers the development of comprehensive strategies aimed at reducing adverse heat-health events. This quantitative study was designed to link temperature with mortality and morbidity events in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA with a focus on the summer season.

Three decades of rapid economic development is causing severe and widespread PM2.5 pollution in China. However, research on the health impacts of PM2.5 exposure has been hindered by limited historical PM2.5 concentration data. The researchers estimated ambient PM2.5 concentrations from 2004 to 2013 in China at 0.1 degree resolution using the latest satellite data and evaluated model performance with available ground observations.

Original Source

The devastating flood episode (16–17 June 2013) at Kedarnath (Uttrakhand, India), caused a huge loss of lives and loss of physical/material wealth. To understand this catastrophic event, rainfall/convective data and associated climate meteorological parameters are investigated. A low-pressure zone with very high cloud cover (60–90 %) and relative humidity (70–100 %), associated with low (< 4 m s−1) wind velocity, are observed over the Kedarnath region during 15–17 June.

Prevalence of walking and cycling for transport is low, varying greatly across countries. Few studies have examined neighborhood perceptions related to walking and cycling for transport in different countries. Therefore it is challenging to prioritize appropriate built environment interventions. The aim of this study was to examine the strength and shape of the relationship between adults’ neighborhood perceptions and walking and cycling for transport across diverse environments.

Original Source

Very little is currently known about air pollutants’ adverse effects on neurodegenerative diseases even though recent studies have linked particulate exposures to brain pathologies associated with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Here we investigate long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution and Parkinson’s disease.

The economic value of unconventional natural gas resources has stimulated rapid globalization of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. However, natural radioactivity found in the large volumes of “produced fluids” generated by these technologies is emerging as an international environmental health concern. Current assessments of the radioactivity concentration in liquid wastes focus on a single element—radium. However, the use of radium alone to predict radioactivity concentrations can greatly underestimate total levels.

Climate change may lead to more severe and extreme heat waves in the future, but its potential impact on sudden infant death—a leading cause of infant mortality—is unclear. The researchers sought to determine whether risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is elevated during hot weather.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the associations between long-term exposure to air pollution and non accidental and cause-specific mortality in the Netherlands based on existing national databases.

In 2010 an estimated 31% of the food in U.S. stores and homes went uneaten, and Americans shipped approximately 34 million tons of food waste to landfills. When food decomposes under anaerobic conditions—for instance, buried beneath other waste in a landfill—it produces methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, landfills are the third largest producer of methane in the United States, accounting for about 18% of methane emissions in 2013.2