Monitoring the air pollution in urban landscapes: How Kodak works, where we live, and how we can improve the living conditions for children and children
Better understanding is needed for solutions to exist. Innovative researchers are devising healthier buildings, designing clinical trials with community involvement, and monitoring the air and water to empower people to protect themselves. They are creating a movement to be more just and Livable.
A big problem in African cities is the particulate matter in the air. Local numbers were needed to make a difference in people’s health. Amegah does not have the budget to deploy air-quality monitors that cost $20,000 or more a piece. In rich countries such as the U.S., these high-sensitivity monitors are not distributed widely.
Rapid population growth and industrialization are creating a fast-growing problem, he says. The risk of heart disease, respiratory disease, and more are increased by exposure to aerosol particles of 2.5 microns and smaller. The WHO links this air pollution to 6.7 million premature deaths every year, 89 percent of which occur in low- and middle-income countries. As of 2019, 99 percent of the world’s population lived somewhere with air quality poorer than that recommended by WHO guidelines.
Around the same time that Amegah went to the WHO meeting, relatively inexpensive air-pollution sensors began to hit the market. When carefully applied and combined, they get the job done even at a few hundred dollars apiece, which is less reliable than the more expensive regulatory monitors. Plus, their low cost makes it easier to distribute more of them to gather local data.
Amegah has a research project in which it is looking at the health of street vendors who are exposed to high levels of pollution from old cars and two-stroke motorcycles. Within this community, he says, “the most vulnerable groups are women and children.” A woman spending up to 12 hours selling things and then going home to cook meals for her children over coal- or wood-burning stove. 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.
Today Amegah is connecting data to health outcomes for children and street vendors thanks to sensors mounted in schools, hospitals and traffic hot spots.
Richard E. Peltier is an environmental health scientist at the University of Massachusetts and he says that Kodak is on the cutting edge of science. He’s got all of it. He has all the pieces in place to bring the monitoring network back to human health.
Living in a Building: Assessing Indoor Environmental Quality at Schools and Non-Fitness Organizations in Pittsburgh, PA, with Erica Cochran Hameen
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 had well-maintained public buildings and schools that had nice light and working doors. In lower income areas, many buildings were in poor shape and some public schools were not near parks and other green spaces.
Cochran Hameen is now co-director of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University, and her students are putting her metrics to work. They are assessing indoor environmental quality at schools and nonprofits in Pittsburgh and recommending upgrades based on their findings, some of which are relatively inexpensive—caulking holes, making windows operable and adding shades can make a big difference.
The effects of windows are surprisingly strong in students well-being and schoolwork. “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. Kids in the US spend more on electricity than they do on books and computers. Some rooms in the facility, like the gym and math classrooms, were kept at their normal temperature by the school’s HVAC system, which set one temperature for the entire facility. The people wasted energy when they opened windows or used space heaters. Students are better off if theyUpgrading can save money and keep them alert.
Source: People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time
Environmental Studies of Abandoned Uranium Mines on Navajo Nation Land: Impacts on Environmental, Health, and Neural Development
To make her resource-intensive evaluations accessible and affordable, Cochran Hameen has been collaborating with computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon. She wants to make a robot that can navigate a building. “I want to show how architecture is beautiful but can also have a big impact on people,” she says.
After Johnnye Lewis moved to New Mexico in 1989, she learned about the legacy 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 scientists, politicians, and members of Indigenous groups were not using the same language to discuss the problems and that tribal members were paying with their health.
The Congress permitted companies to dig on tribal lands. Today, after decades of mining for vanadium, gold, uranium, and other metals, at least 160,000 abandoned mines remain in the western U.S. More than 500 abandoned uranium mines, along with 1,100 uranium waste sites, are on Navajo land, and people living there have been exposed for decades. 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.
In her role as an environmental toxicologist and director of a research center, Lewis connects research to interventions that could help people. Scientists at the center found that zinc can be replaced in the same way arsenic and uranium can be replaced in different ways, which might increase cancer risk. Lewis and his group are testing zinc supplements to see whether they could improve people’s health.
Lewis and her team used the help of community members in the Red Water Pond Road area to design a study about pregnant women and their babies exposure to toxic metals during their first year of life. The study, which began in 2013, has been extended and will continue to track the children as part of the National Institutes of Health’s ongoing National Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes initiative.
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. She has improved the science thanks to them. “Science is a special training I have, but it should just be one piece coming to the table,” Lewis says.
An American journalist, Bourzac works in San Francisco for Nature, Science News, and other publications.
Source: People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time
Population change in Costa Rica: how pesticide exposure affects maternal and infant health and development in the Matina district of Limn Province, Costa Rica
Anyone who works on or lives near a banana plantation in Costa Rica is subject to relatively high pesticide exposure. Farmers do not allow anything to chance. Farmers spray cropdusters and plastic bags with a pesticide to prevent bugs from getting into fruit when a banana tree has a leaf.
Van Wendel de Joode focuses her research on how prenatal and childhood exposure to pesticides affects health and development in rural areas of the country. Poverty, inadequate education and low food security are just a few factors that contribute to environmental health risks from pesticide exposure in the populations van de Joode works with.
A large scale study of 300 mother-child pairs in the Matina District of Limn Province is one of the projects done by van Wendel de Joode. The goal of the project is to identify factors that lead to higher chemical exposure, and how that affects overall health and brain development. 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.
Van Wendel de Joode’s research led the Costa Rican government to provide clean water to a community whose groundwater is contaminated with pesticides and Escherichia coli. When she showed that plastic fruit bags were just as effective against insect damage when treated with mustard or without chemicals, growers stopped using the insecticide-treated versions.
maps of aerial-pesticideHOTTENS are being created to highlight which ones are close to populated areas. And her team has started a pilot program to test a play-based learning program for schoolchildren, including those with pesticide-induced neurodevelopmental delays.
Source: People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time
A thank you for helping me and my family (and for teaching me!) to live with the Clebsch Parasitos de la Habanas
Mora holds her former mentor to high regard and worked with him. Mora says that she’s passionate about improving people’s health. I am a Costa Rican citizen and so I feel very grateful for what she has done.
One of the deadliest tropical diseases is snakebite envenomation. The people with the lowest resources are more at risk because they don’t know how to protect themselves from being bitten or access the best care. New treatments can save a lot of lives.
The range and prevalence of many diseases are changing because of the climate crisis. People working in agricultural fields and construction sites are the most at risk of contracting valley contagious diseases. 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.