This next interesting report struck a nerve when my daughter in northern California called me because she was having difficulty finishing her daily 7 miles run without getting short of breath. The administrators at her graduate school were advising students to exercise at the inside facilities.

“There is simply no president for this”Salynn Boyles at the International ACAAI Annual Scientific Meeting wrote that the short- and long-term health impact of environmental events, such as the Camp Fire in California, on large populations are not well understood, according to experts at the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (ACAAI) annual scientific meeting.

The Camp Fire, which was still burning across more than 200 miles of Northern California on Sunday, ranked among one of the worst natural disasters in the U.S. this century, with the death toll continuing the climb and close to 1,300 people still counted among the missing.

After burning for more than a week, the fire elevated air pollution levels in San Francisco and the surrounding areas to the point where the region reportedly has the poorest air quality on the planet.

Most outdoor events in San Francisco (about 180 miles from the fire zone) on Saturday were canceled or postponed, including the game between football rivals Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley. San Francisco officials also took the city’s iconic open-air cable cars out of commission due to the poor air quality.

David Peden, MD, of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health in Chapel Hill, spoke about the Camp Fire at an ACAAI session on the impact of the environment on allergic disease.

“At these levels, any outdoor activity is dangerous for people with chronic diseases like COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] or heart disease,” Peden said. “Everyone understands the allergy risk and the risk for other airway diseases. But there is a clear signal of inflammation in cardiac disease and breathing pollution triggers inflammation.”

Peden, who studies the role of air pollution in the airway and cardiovascular disease, noted that while California has seen wildfires of increasing frequency and intensity, other regions of the country are also increasingly vulnerable as drought conditions intensify. These areas include eastern Montana, western portions of the Dakotas, and large parts of the Mexican border.

Peden, along with ACAAI attendee Katherine Gundling, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, told MedPage Today that current air quality in San Francisco — reported to be in the very unhealthy PM2.5 range of 201-300 on Saturday — compared unfavorably to some of the most polluted areas of China and India, which have average air quality PM_2.5 in the range of 100-150.

Peden stated that during the 2013 California Rim Fire, daily air pollution exposure levels among people in urban areas affected by the fire were up to 35 times greater than the 24-hour PM_2.5 standard (35μg/m₃) considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Gundling agreed that it will take time to understand the short- and long-term health impact of events like the Camp Fire.

“There is simply no precedent for this,” she told MedPage Today. “We are used to wildfires, but not fires that kill large numbers of people who have no chance of escape. That is the new and horrible reality we are living.”

She added that the increasing frequency and intensity of the California fires should serve as a wake-up call for the country.

“These fires are different,” she said. “It’s not just that there are more of them and that they are more severe. It’s a number of factors. It’s climate change. It’s forest management. All of this has to be addressed.”

Forecasts were for air quality to remain in the unhealthy 100-200 range through Tuesday in San Francisco, the East Bay, and other parts of the Bay area. Rain bringing wind is expected in the area on Tuesday.

Public health officials advised residents to stay indoors whenever possible and wear N95 masks when outdoors. Some city governments and independent organizations are distributing face masks.

Now consider a research study, which looked at air pollution and intellectual disabilities in children.

Climate Change Is Already Hurting U.S. Communities, Federal Report Says

Rebecca Hersher discussed on All Things Considered that climate change is already causing more frequent and severe weather across the U.S., and the country is poised to suffer massive damage to infrastructure, ecosystems, health and the economy if global warming is allowed to continue, according to the most comprehensive federal climate report to date.

The fourth National Climate Assessment is the culmination of years of research and analysis by hundreds of top climate scientists in the country. The massive report details the many ways in which global climate change is already affecting American communities, from hurricanes to wildfires to floods to drought.

“Climate change is already affecting every part of the United States, almost every sector of the United States, be it agriculture or forestry or energy, tourism,” says George Mason University professor Andrew Light, who is one of the report’s editors. “It’s going to hurt cities, it’s going to hurt people in the countryside, and, as the world continues to warm, things are going to get worse.”

President Trump, numerous Cabinet members and some members of Congress have questioned whether humans cause climate change or whether it is happening at all.

“I don’t think there’s a hoax. I do think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made,” the president said on CBS’ 60 Minutes in October.

In an August interview about deadly wildfires in California, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told television station KCRA Sacramento: “This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management.”

The new report, mandated by Congress and published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is the latest and most detailed confirmation that humans are driving climate change and that Americans are already adapting to and suffering from its effects. Climate change is “an immediate threat, not a far-off possibility,” it says.

For example, large wildfires are getting more frequent because of climate change. The report notes that the area burned in wildfires nationwide each year has increased over the past 20 years, and “although projections vary by state and or region, on average, the annual area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire is expected to increase by at least 30 percent by 2060.”

Millions Of Acres Burned By Wildfires In The U.S. From 1985 To 2017

Although California and other Western states have made headlines for deadly fires, the report says the southeastern U.S. is also projected to suffer more wildfires.

Many regions are also experiencing more extreme rain — and ensuing floods — including the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southern Great Plains, which includes Texas and Oklahoma. The most extreme example is Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 60 inches of rain on parts of southeast Texas in 2017 and flooded an enormous region from Houston up to the Louisiana border.

And the authors make clear that more extreme rainfall and flooding is widespread, going beyond major hurricanes. In the Midwest, runoff from heavy rains has depleted some cropland of nutrients. In the Northeast, towns are dealing with catastrophic flooding from summer thunderstorms.

“If you look at the whole U.S., the amount of precipitation overall may be less, but it’s delivered in these very intense precipitation events,” explains Brenda Ekwurzel, an author of the report and senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That’s how you get a lot of flash flooding, especially after a wildfire.”

In the Southwest, climate change is driving a particularly devious phenomenon: climate change is contributing to drought and flooding in the same place. Drought takes hold for months. When rain does fall, it’s increasingly likely to come as an extreme rainstorm, which causes flash flooding and landslides. Scientists predict that dynamic will only get worse as climate change progresses.

The report’s authors also focus multiple chapters on the health effects of climate change. In a section on air pollution, they write:

“Unless counteracting efforts to improve air quality are implemented, climate change will worsen existing air pollution levels. This worsened air pollution would increase the incidence of adverse respiratory and cardiovascular health effects, including premature death.”

And as the climate warms, disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes and ticks are also expected to expand their territory.

The authors warn that those who are most economically and physically vulnerable will continue to be most severely impacted by climate change, whether it’s air pollution, disease, floods or fire disasters.

Climate adaptation is already taking place at the local, state and regional level, the report says. It gives examples including water conservation, forest management, infrastructure updates and agricultural advances.

“The real leading edge of action in the United States, now, to deal with climate change is at the non-federal level,” says Light, who also serves as a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute think tank. “It states, it’s cities, it’s businesses.”

But far more involvement is needed on all levels to change human behavior.

“Successful adaptation has been hindered by the assumption that climate conditions are and will be similar to those in the past,” the authors write, arguing that acknowledging climate change, adapting to its effects and working to limit global warming, while expensive, will save money and lives in the long term.

Those findings are in stark contrast to policies put forward by the Trump administration, which include announcing that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which set international targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

While the new report does not make policy recommendations, it is designed to be a scientific resource for leaders at all levels of government.

“We’re putting a cost on inaction,” explains Ekwurzel, referring to future global inaction to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. “There’s some really heavy duty news in here. I mean, we’re talking billions of dollars as the cost of inaction each year. I think a lot of people in the U.S. will be surprised by that.”

Study uncovers the link between air pollution and intellectual disabilities in children

The journal Wiley reported that British children with intellectual disabilities are more likely than their peers to live in areas with high outdoor air pollution, according to a new Journal of Intellectual Disability Research study funded by Public Health England.

The findings come from an analysis of data extracted from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative sample of more than 18,000 UK children born from 2000 to 2002.

Averaging across ages, children with intellectual disabilities were 33 percent more likely to live in areas with high levels of diesel particulate matter, 30 percent more likely to live in areas with high levels of nitrogen dioxide, 30 percent more likely to live in areas with high levels of carbon monoxide, and 17 percent more likely to live in areas with high levels of sulphur dioxide.

The authors note that intellectual disability is more common among children living in more socioeconomically deprived areas, which tend to have higher levels of air pollution; however, exposure to outdoor air pollution may impede cognitive development, thereby increasing the risk of intellectual disability.

“We know that people with intellectual disabilities in the UK have poorer health and die earlier than they should. This research adds another piece to the jigsaw of understanding why that is the case and what needs to be done about it,” said lead author Dr. Eric Emerson, of The University of Sydney, in Australia.

So, whether you believe in climate change and its relationship to the wildfires in California the extent of the fires, what we are seeing now with the physical damage is just the beginning.

Finally, after my post on gun control look at this news report: Milwaukee Girl Who Condemned Gun Violence Is Killed By Bullet

Jessica Reedy wrote that two years ago when sixth-grader Sandra Parks was at Milwaukee’s Keefe Avenue School, she wrote an essay about gun violence:

“We are in a state of chaos. In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost every day. Little children are victims of senseless gun violence. There is too much black on black crime. As an African-American, that makes me feel depressed. Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr. King’s dream!”

The essay titled “Our Truth” took third place in Milwaukee Public School’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest. In January 2017, Sandra told Wisconsin Public Radio, “All you hear about is somebody dying and somebody getting shot. People do not just think about whose father or son or granddaughter or grandson was just killed.”

She also said she looked forward to doing big things in her life. “I would like to stop all the violence and… negativity that’s going on in the world,” she said. “And stop all the black on black crimes, and all the rumors and stereotypes that’s been spread around.”

How horrible an outcome for this sixth-grade girl and just for her condemnation of gun violence!

Where are we going as a society?