No collapswashing

L’assassinat du PDG de United Healthcare, la principale compagnie d’assurances médicales privée des États-Unis, relance le débat sur les dysfonctionnements de la couverture médicale et la violence des rapports sociaux.

Voor het eerst hebben Vlaamse wetenschappers uit verschillende vakgebieden hun krachten gebundeld om de cruciale link tussen de gezondheid van de oceaan en die van de mens in kaart te brengen. Deze zogenaamde 'Ostend Working Group on Ocean and Human Health' vat hun bevindingen en praktische aanbevelingen voor beleidsmakers nu samen in een nieuw rapport.

Months of scorching temperatures sometimes over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in parts of India this year left hundreds dead or ill. Official government records put the number of heat-related deaths this year as 110, but public health experts say that number is more likely in the thousands. Poor data collection methods and reporting are stopping the country from getting a more accurate picture of how deadly the heat is. Experts are concerned that it's hindering efforts to better prepare for future heat waves.

Research shows climate change carries greater risks for unborn babies than previously thought. Some of the alarming effects of global warming may include worsening health and wellbeing in later life.

The contaminants have also recently been found in testes and semen amid concerns about falling male fertility

Record-breaking temperatures were recorded across the globe in 2023. Without climate action, adverse climate-related health impacts are expected to worsen worldwide, affecting billions of people. Temperatures in Europe are warming at twice the rate of the global average, threatening the health of populations across the continent and leading to unnecessary loss of life. The Lancet Countdown in Europe was established in 2021, to assess the health profile of climate change aiming to stimulate European social and political will to implement rapid health-responsive climate mitigation and adaptation actions. In 2022, the collaboration published its indicator report, tracking progress on health and climate change via 33 indicators and across five domains.

Texans have long endured scorching summer temperatures, so a global warming increase of about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) might not sound like much to worry about. But a new study concludes that the heat index — essentially how hot it really feels — has increased much faster in Texas than has the measured temperature: about three times faster.

Ce cadre de travail, qui envisage les questions de santé à l’intersection du monde humain, du monde animal et des écosystèmes, prend en compte des interconnexions du vivant pour prendre soin de la planète et de tous ses habitants.

This report written by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Oliver Wyman, provides an in-depth economic analysis of how climate change will reshape health landscapes over the next two decades. It highlights increased risks from new pathogens, pollution and extreme weather events and shows how these will exacerbate current health inequities, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable populations.

Without a phase out of fossil fuels, by 2100, 1 in 12 hospitals worldwide will be at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather events — a total of 16,245 hospitals. Without a phase out of fossil fuels, all of these 16,245 hospitals will require adaptation, where suitable. Even with this enormous investment, for many, relocation will be the only option.

Dear COP 28 President-Designate Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, This year, world leaders gathering in the UAE to take stock of their climate commitments will for the first time engage in official programming focused on health. We, the signatories of this letter, support your leadership in bringing health front and center at COP28.

One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.It recognizes that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.

Joint action is essential for planetary and human health Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency. The world is currently responding to the climate crisis and the nature crisis as if they were separate challenges. This is a dangerous mistake. The 28th UN Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change is about to be held in Dubai while the 16th COP on biodiversity is due to be held in Turkey in 2024. The research communities that provide the evidence for the two COPs are unfortunately largely separate, but they were brought together for a workshop in 2020 when they concluded: “Only by considering climate and biodiversity as parts of the same complex problem … can solutions be developed that avoid maladaptation and max

The world’s first study of the increase in pollution from landscape fires across the globe over the past two decades reveals that over 2 billion people are exposed to at least one day of potentially health-impacting environmental hazard annually – a figure that has increased by 6.8 per cent in the last ten years.

Scientists have raised concerns about whether high-income countries, with their high per-capita CO2 emissions, can decarbonise fast enough to meet their obligations under the Paris Agreement if they continue to pursue aggregate economic growth. Over the past decade, some countries have reduced their CO2 emissions while increasing their gross domestic product (absolute decoupling). Politicians and media have hailed this as green growth. In this empirical study, we aimed to assess whether these achievements are consistent with the Paris Agreement, and whether Paris-compliant decoupling is within reach.

Access to robust and current information is essential for ensuring evidence-based policy and practice and identifying research gaps. For these purposes, more than 90 authors from about 30 national public authorities and institutions contributed to a comprehensive synthesis of the current evidence in Germany, published as 14 articles in the Journal of Health Monitoring.

ibrio are bacteria that cause an estimated 80,000 illnesses each year in the United States. About a dozen species of Vibrio are pathogenic to humans. V. parahaemolyticus causes the most infections in the United States, accounting for about 40% of reported cases of vibriosis, followed by V. alginolyticus, which accounts for about 20%. Most people with Vibrio infection have diarrhea. Some people might also have stomach cramping, nausea, vomiting, fever, and chills. One species, V. vulnificus, is known to cause life-threatening infections. About 150–200 V. vulnificus infections are reported to CDC each year and about one in five people with this infection die—sometimes within 1–2 days of becoming ill.

In het Congolese park Kahuzi-Biega zijn interacties tussen dieren en mensen schering en inslag. Om de risico’s van overdraagbare ziektes te beperken, werd het project One health gelanceerd. Daarbij wordt gepleit voor een holistische aanpak: de gezondheid van mens, milieu en dier vormt één geheel.

I'm an independent healthcare analyst with more than 24 years of experience analyzing healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Specifically, I analyze the value (costs and benefits) of biologics and pharmaceuticals, patient access to prescription drugs, the regulatory framework for drug development and reimbursement, and ethics with respect to the distribution of healthcare resources. I have approximately 110 publications in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to hundreds of articles in newspapers and periodicals. I have also presented my work at numerous trade, industry, and academic conferences. From 1999 to 2017 I was a research associate professor at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. Prior to my Tufts appointment, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and I completed my PhD in economics at the University of Amsterdam. Before pursuing my PhD I was a management consultant at Accenture in The Hague, Netherlands. Currently, and for the past 6 years, I work on a freelance ba

Going beyond climate disruption, the report by the Earth Commission group of scientists presents disturbing evidence that our planet faces growing crises of water availability, nutrient loading, ecosystem maintenance and aerosol pollution. These pose threats to the stability of life-support systems and worsen social equality.

In early May, a groundbreaking study from the University of California, San Francisco of 171 pregnant women found more than 9 in 10 had measurable amounts of 19 different chemicals and pesticides in their bodies. Researchers said many of those substances pass through the placenta and into developing fetuses, adding evidence to a National Institutes of Health report that warned babies are born "pre-polluted" with chemicals.

Recycled and reused food contact plastics are “vectors for spreading chemicals of concern” because they accumulate and release hundreds of dangerous toxins like styrene, benzene, bisphenol, heavy metals, formaldehyde and phthalates, new research finds.

Read the latest news headlines and analysis about politics, sports, business, lifestyle and entertainment from award winning Irish and British journalists.

World is on track for 2.7C and ‘phenomenal’ human suffering, scientists warn. Up to 1 billion people could choose to migrate to cooler places, the scientists said, although those areas remaining within the climate niche would still experience more frequent heatwaves and droughts. However, urgent action to lower carbon emissions and keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cut the number of people pushed outside the climate niche by 80%, to 400 million.

Humans prospered in a stable climate. But conditions are changing. Research out today shows 2 billion people will be pushed out of the habitable zone by 2.7C warming. Why? What does this mean for us?

Potential external cost savings associated with the reduction of animal-sourced foods remain poorly understood. Here we combine life cycle assessment principles and monetarization factors to estimate the monetary worth of damage to human health and ecosystems caused by the environmental impacts of food production. We find that, globally, approximately US$2 of production-related external costs were embedded in every dollar of food expenditure in 2018—corresponding to US$14.0 trillion of externalities. A dietary shift away from animal-sourced foods could greatly reduce these ‘hidden’ costs, saving up to US$7.3 trillion worth of production-related health burden and ecosystem degradation while curbing carbon emissions. By comparing the health effects of dietary change from the consumption versus the production of food, we also show that omitting the latter means underestimating the benefits of more plant-based diets. Our analysis reveals the substantial potential of dietary change, particularly in high and upper-

The 21-year-old Iraqi, who lived by a smoke-choked oilfield, died of cancer. His message must be heard, says journalist Jess Kelly

Those with higher levels of PFAS in their blood had 40% lower chance of conceiving within a year of trying

Tiny plastic particles can travel worldwide, ending up in urban, rural, and remote areas. They take an even faster transport pathway than oceanic currents: the atmosphere.

Heat and cold are now established health risk factors, with several studies reporting important mortality effects in populations around the world.1, 2, 3 The associated health burden is expected to increase with climate change, especially under the most extreme scenarios of global warming.4, 5 However, robust estimates of excess mortality in the current and future periods are still challenging to obtain due to the numerous factors influencing vulnerability to heat and cold, including climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic conditions.6 These factors represent the main drivers of variation in mortality risks, which have been shown to differ geographically and across age groups.

Only 13 of the world's countries and territories had "healthy" air quality last year, according to a new report, as air pollution surged to alarming levels in 2022.

A train derailed and flooded a town with cancer-causing chemicals. But something larger, and more troubling, is at work.

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Wheat is an important global crop, but new research suggests that fungal toxins have contaminated half of all European wheat produced for food. the widespread presence of vomitoxin in our food is concerning. It is not yet known how constant, low-level dietary exposure to mycotoxins can affect human health in the long term. This is compounded by the fact that one-quarter of the wheat contaminated with vomitoxin also contained other FHB mycotoxins, raising concerns of synergism, where toxins interact with each other and cause greater harm than the sum of the individual toxins acting alone.

Gestational exposure to ambient fine particles (PM2.5) increases the risk of stillbirth, but the related disease burden is unknown, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We combine state-of-the-art estimates on stillbirths, and multiple exposure–response functions obtained from previous meta-analyses or derived by a self-matched case-control study in 54 LMICs. 13,870 stillbirths and 32,449 livebirths are extracted from 113 geocoded surveys from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Each stillbirth is compared to livebirth(s) of the same mother using a conditional logit regression. We find that 10-µg/m3 increase of PM2.5 is associated with an 11.0% (95% confidence interval [CI] 6.4, 15.7) increase in the risk of stillbirth, and the association is significantly enhanced by maternal age. Based on age-specific nonlinear PM2.5–stillbirth curves, we evaluate the PM2.5-related stillbirths in 137 countries. In 2015, of 2.09 (95% CI: 1.98, 2.20) million stillbirths, 0.83 (0.54, 1.08) million or 39.7%

As part of a major reform of the EU’s anti-pollution legislation, the European Commission said it planned to tighten air quality standards, including on one of the most dangerous pollutants, fine particulate matter. Water standards are also going to be stricter, with 25 substances added to a control list, such as the category of PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”), the substance Bisphenol A, pesticides including glyphosate, and antibiotics.

Healthy teenagers are more prone to irregular heartbeats after breathing in fine particulate air pollution, according to the first major study of its impact on otherwise healthy young individuals. The findings have raised concern among researchers because heart arrhythmias, which can increase the risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac death, appear to be triggered even when air pollution is within common air quality limits.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and almost 200 other health associations have made an unprecedented call for a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. A call to action published on Wednesday, urges governments to agree a legally binding plan to phase out fossil fuel exploration and production, similar to the framework convention on tobacco, which was negotiated under the WHO’s auspices in 2003. “The modern addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it is an act of self-sabotage,” said the WHO president, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The goal of our project is to compile in a systematic manner the evidence in support of transmittable diseases being aggravated by climate hazards. To ensure a systematic review, we scrutinized the first 200 references in Google Scholar that resulted from using as keywords each possible combination of ten climate hazards (i.e., warming, heatwaves, precipitation, floods, drought, fires, sea level, storms, natural cover change, ocean climate change) and “human diseases”. We selected papers that reported cases examples of diseases regardless of whether impacts were positive or negative. Selected papers were read and from them extracted any mention to cases examples ofdiseasesaggravated by climate hazards.

Pennsylvania children living near fracking sites at birth are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia during early childhood than those who did not live near such facilities, a new study has found.