Purpose of Review
Climate change is causing warming over most parts of the USA and more extreme weather events. The health impacts of these changes are not experienced equally. We synthesize the ...recent evidence that climatic changes linked to global warming are having a disparate impact on the health of people of color, including children.
Recent Findings
Multiple studies of heat, extreme cold, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires find evidence that people of color, including Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Asian communities are at higher risk of climate-related health impacts than Whites, although this is not always the case. Studies of adults have found evidence of racial disparities related to climatic changes with respect to mortality, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, mental health, and heat-related illness. Children are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change, and infants and children of color have experienced adverse perinatal outcomes, occupational heat stress, and increases in emergency department visits associated with extreme weather.
Summary
The evidence strongly suggests climate change is an environmental injustice that is likely to exacerbate existing racial disparities across a broad range of health outcomes.
...consideration of the value-laden nature of policy interventions and the creation of forums to debate the moral and ethical dimensions of different approaches to urban health and city environments ...are essential. ...attention to health inequalities within urban areas should be a key focus of planning the urban environment.
Exposure to ultrafine particulate matter (PM0.1) is positively associated with the etiology of different acute and chronic disorders; however, the in-depth biological imprints that link these ...submicron particles with the disturbances in the epigenomic machinery are not well defined. Earlier, we showed that exposure to these particles causes significant disturbances in the mitochondrial machinery and triggers PI-3-kinase mediated DNA damage responses. In the present study, we aimed to further understand the epigenomic insights of the ultrafine PM exposure. The higher levels of intracellular reactive oxygen species and depleted Nrf-2 in ultrafine PM exposed cells reconfirmed its potential to induce oxidative stress. Importantly, the observed increase in the levels of NF-κβ and associated cytokines among exposed cells suggested the activation of NF-κβ mediated inflammatory loop which potentially serves as a platform for initiating epigenetic insinuations. This fact was strongly supported by the altered miRNA expression profile of the ultrafine PM exposed cells. These NF-κβ induced miRNA alterations were also found to be associated with other epigenetic targets as the exposed cells showed higher expression levels of DNA methyltransferases which positively corresponded with the global changes in DNA methylation levels. Upon further analysis, significant alterations in histone code were also reported in ultrafine PM exposed cells. Conclusively our results suggested that NF-κβ acts as an inflammatory switch that possesses the potential to induce genome-wide epigenetic modification upon ultrafine PM exposure.
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•Ultrafine PM is associated with the etiology of different acute & chronic disorders.•Exposure to ultrafine PM significantly disturbs the NF-κβ mediated signaling cascade.•The aberrant NF-κβ expression acts as a switch to induce epigenetic alterations.•This involves aberrant miRNA expression, DNA methylation and histone modifications.
'Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005-2011), ...OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.
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