Hurricanes and Health Equity: A Review of Structural Determinants of Vulnerability for Climate and Health Research.

Purpose Of Review: Understanding hurricane vulnerability is crucial for targeting and identifying climate adaptation measures. However, vulnerability assessments often focus on proximal factors, which may obscure underlying drivers of health inequities. We sought to describe the literature characterizing hurricane vulnerability in the U.

Racial Disparities in Health Care Use in Gentrifying Neighborhoods.

Objective: Racial disparities in health outcomes are a persistent threat in gentrifying neighborhoods. A contributor to health outcomes is health services utilization, the extent to which people receive care from a medical professional. There are documented racial disparities in health services utilization in the general population.

Agreement in extreme precipitation exposure assessment is modified by race and social vulnerability.

Epidemiologic investigations of extreme precipitation events (EPEs) often rely on observations from the nearest weather station to represent individuals' exposures, and due to structural factors that determine the siting of weather stations, levels of measurement error and misclassification bias may differ by race, class, and other measures of social vulnerability. Gridded climate datasets provide higher spatial resolution that may improve measurement error and misclassification bias. However, similarities in the ability to identify EPEs among these types of datasets have not been explored.

Environmental Exposure Disparities and Neurodevelopmental Risk: a Review.

Purpose Of Review: Neurotoxicant exposures are of particular concern in historically marginalized communities. Often a consequence of structural racism, low-income minoritized populations experience a disproportionate burden of hazardous exposures through proximity to industrial facilities, high traffic roads, and suboptimal housing. Here, we summarize reports on exposures and neurodevelopment focused on differences by education, income, race/ethnicity, or immigration status from 2015 to 2022, discuss the importance of such investigations in overburdened communities, and recommend areas for future research.

Climate Change, Environmental Disasters, and Health Inequities: The Underlying Role of Structural Inequalities.

Purpose Of Review: We review and analyze recent literature in public health, urban planning, and disaster management to better understand the relationships between climate change, natural disasters, and root causes of health disparities in the USA.

Recent Findings: Existing scholarship establishes clear linkages between climate change and increasing occurrences and severity of natural disasters across the USA. The frequency and types of disasters vary by region and impact both short and long-term health outcomes.

Extreme Precipitation Events and Infectious Disease Risk: A Scoping Review and Framework for Infectious Respiratory Viruses.

Extreme precipitation events (EPE) change the natural and built environments and alter human behavior in ways that facilitate infectious disease transmission. EPEs are expected with high confidence to increase in frequency and are thus of great public health importance. This scoping review seeks to summarize the mechanisms and severity of impacts of EPEs on infectious diseases, to provide a conceptual framework for the influence of EPEs on infectious respiratory diseases, and to define areas of future study currently lacking in this field.

Examining the Role of Family History of US Enslavement in Health Care System Distrust Today.

Objective: Black/African American people have long reported high, albeit warranted, distrust of the US health care system (HCS); however, Blacks/African Americans are not a homogenous racial/ethnic group. Little information is available on how the subgroup of Black Americans whose families suffered under US chattel slavery, here called Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS), view health care institutions. We compared knowledge of unethical treatment and HCS distrust among DAEUS and non-DAEUS.

Environmental risk factors associated with pulmonary isolation of nontuberculous mycobacteria, a population-based study in the southeastern United States.

The prevalence of pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) disease is increasing in the United States. Associations were evaluated among residents of central North Carolina between pulmonary isolation of NTM and environmental risk factors including: surface water, drinking water source, urbanicity, and exposures to soils favorable to NTM growth. Reports of pulmonary NTM isolation from patients residing in three counties in central North Carolina during 2006-2010 were collected from clinical laboratories and from the State Laboratory of Public Health.

Racial Disparities in Hypertension Prevalence within US Gentrifying Neighborhoods.

Racial disparities in hypertension remain a persistent public health concern in the US. While several studies report Black-White differences in the health impacts of gentrification, little is known concerning the impact of living in a gentrifying neighborhood on hypertension disparities. Data from the American Community Survey were used to identify gentrifying neighborhoods across the US from 2006 to 2017.

Impacts of Gentrification on Health in the US: a Systematic Review of the Literature.

Gentrification in the largest 50 US cities has more than doubled since the 1990s. The process of gentrification can bring about improved neighborhood conditions, reduced rates of crime, and property value increases. At the same time, it can equally foster negative conditions associated with poorer health outcomes, such as disrupted social networks from residential displacement and increases in stress.

Gentrification: A Priority for Environmental Justice and Health Equity Research.

Although gentrification is occurring at increasing rates across the United States, our understanding of what this means for public health is limited. While positive changes, such as increases in property values and reduced crime rates occur, negative consequences, such as residential displacement, also ensue. Individuals living through gentrification experience major changes in social and environmental conditions often in short periods of time, which can result in disrupted social networks and stress, both associated with decrements in health.

A spatial analysis of climate gentrification in Orleans Parish, Louisiana post-Hurricane Katrina.

Background: Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana as a Category 3 storm in August 2005. Storm surges, levee failures, and the low-lying nature of New Orleans led to widespread flooding, damage to over 70% of occupied housing, and evacuation of 80-90% of city residents. Only 57% of the city's black population has returned.

Application of diagnostic criteria for non-tuberculous mycobacterial disease to a case series of mycobacterial-positive isolates.

The American Thoracic Society (ATS) and Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) have provided guidelines to assist in the accurate diagnosis of lung disease caused by nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). These microbiologic, radiographic, and clinical criteria are considered equally important and all must be met to make the diagnosis of NTM lung disease. To assess the significance of the three criteria, each was evaluated for its contribution to the diagnosis of NTM lung disease in a case series.

Ambient air pollution as a mediator in the pathway linking race/ethnicity to blood pressure elevation: The multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis (MESA).

Background: Racial/ethnic disparities in blood pressure and hypertension have been evident in previous studies, as were associations between race/ethnicity with ambient air pollution and those between air pollution with hypertension. The role of air pollution exposure to racial/ethnic differences in hypertension has not been explored.

Objective: To assess the potential mediating effects of ambient air pollution on the association between race/ethnicity and blood pressure levels.

Disentangling Race and Place in Depressive Symptoms in Men.

African American men report lower levels of depressive symptoms that their white peers in national data. However, the value of these studies is often undermined by data that confound race, socioeconomic status, and segregation. We sought to determine whether race differences in depressive symptoms were present after minimizing the effects of socioeconomic status and segregation within a cohort of southwest Baltimore (SWB) men using the data from the Exploring Health Disparities in Integrated Communities (EHDIC), a novel study of racial disparities within communities where African American and non-Hispanic white males live together and have similar median incomes.

Disentangling Race, Poverty, and Place in Disparities in Physical Activity.

Significant racial disparities in physical activity-a key protective health factor against obesity and cardiovascular disease-exist in the United States. Using data from the 1999-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the 2000 United States (US) Census, we estimated the impact of race, individual-level poverty, neighborhood-level poverty, and neighborhood racial composition on the odds of being physically active for 19,678 adults. Compared to whites, blacks had lower odds of being physically active.

Extreme precipitation and emergency room visits for influenza in Massachusetts: a case-crossover analysis.

Background: Influenza peaks during the wintertime in temperate regions and during the annual rainy season in tropical regions - however reasons for the observed differences in disease ecology are poorly understood. We hypothesize that episodes of extreme precipitation also result in increased influenza in the Northeastern United States, but this association is not readily apparent, as no defined 'rainy season' occurs. Our objective was to evaluate the association between extreme precipitation (≥ 99th percentile) events and risk of emergency room (ER) visit for influenza in Massachusetts during 2002-2008.

Epidemiology of nontuberculous mycobacteria isolations among central North Carolina residents, 2006-2010.

Background: Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are environmental mycobacteria associated with a range of infections. Reports of NTM epidemiology have primarily focused on pulmonary infections and isolations, however extrapulmonary infections of the skin, soft tissues and sterile sites are less frequently described.

Methods: We comprehensively reviewed laboratory reports of NTM isolation from North Carolina residents of three counties during 2006-2010.

Air Pollution and Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Nested Case-Control Study among Members of a Northern California Health Plan.

Background: Ecologic analyses, case-case comparisons, and animal experiments suggest positive associations between air pollution and tuberculosis.

Objectives: We evaluated this hypothesis in a large sample, which yielded results that are applicable to the general population.

Methods: We conducted a case-control study nested within a cohort of Kaiser Permanente of Northern California members.

Cigarette smoking and pulmonary tuberculosis in northern California.

Background: A positive association between smoking and increased risk of tuberculosis disease is well documented for populations outside the USA. However, it is unclear whether smoking increases risk of tuberculosis in the USA, where both smoking prevalence and disease rates are much lower than in the countries where previous studies have been conducted.

Methods: To explore the tuberculosis-smoking association in a more generalisable US population-based sample, we conducted a nested case-control study among members of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC).

Trends in gastroenteritis-associated mortality in the United States, 1985-2005: variations by ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes.

Background: Trends in gastroenteritis-associated mortality are changing over time with development of antibiotic resistant strains of certain pathogens, improved diagnostic methods, and changing healthcare. In 1999, ICD-10 coding was introduced for mortality records which can also affect trends. We assess trends in gastroenteritis-associated mortality and changes associated with coding.

Particulate air pollution and susceptibility to the development of pulmonary tuberculosis disease in North Carolina: an ecological study.

Although Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative agent of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB), environmental factors may influence disease progression. Ecologic studies conducted in countries outside the USA with high levels of air pollution and PTB have suggested a link between active disease and ambient air pollution. The present investigation is the first to examine the ambient air pollution-PTB association in a country, where air pollution levels are comparatively lower.