Publications by authors named "Noah Scovronick"

Article Synopsis
  • Research reveals that fine particulate matter (PM) from wildland fire smoke significantly affects health, but the impact of its composition remains unclear.
  • A new model was created to estimate daily concentrations of smoke-derived Organic Carbon (OC) and Elemental Carbon (EC) in the U.S. and Southern Canada from 2002 to 2019, showing that wildland fire smoke has offset some improvements in air quality.
  • Long-term exposure to smoke-derived carbonaceous PM results in over 7,000 deaths annually in the contiguous U.S. alone, emphasizing the need for effective policies to manage fire smoke due to increasing frequency and intensity linked to climate change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As wildfires increasingly impact the global economy and public health, understanding their effects is crucial. Particularly, the relationship between wildfires and anxiety disorders remains unclear. In this study, we explore this association by analyzing 1,897,865 emergency department visits for anxiety disorders in the western United States.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: While COVID-19 continues to challenge the world, meteorological variables are thought to impact COVID-19 transmission. Previous studies showed evidence of negative associations between high temperature and absolute humidity on COVID-19 transmission. Our research aims to fill the knowledge gap on the modifying effect of vaccination rates and strains on the weather-COVID-19 association.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how daily rainfall characteristics—like intensity, duration, and frequency—affect mortality rates from all causes, cardiovascular issues, and respiratory problems across 34 countries from 1980 to 2020.
  • It utilizes a time series analysis to evaluate the association between daily mortality and rainfall events that occur at different return periods (one, two, and five years), including the effects of extreme rainfall with a 14-day lag.
  • The results indicate that extreme rainfall events (five-year return period) correlate with increased mortality rates, particularly for respiratory cases, while moderate rainfall shows protective effects, and the impact varies based on climate and vegetation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Heterogeneity in temperature-mortality relationships across locations may partly result from differences in the demographic structure of populations and their cause-specific vulnerabilities. Here we conduct the largest epidemiological study to date on the association between ambient temperature and mortality by age and cause using data from 532 cities in 33 countries.

Methods: We collected daily temperature and mortality data from each country.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Here, we investigate the association between outdoor temperature and fatal police shootings in the United States between 2015 and 2021.

Methods: We conducted a time-stratified case-crossover study. Data on fatal police shootings were from the Washington Post's Fatal Force database and temperature data were from Daymet.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Temperature variability (TV), both intra-day and inter-day, impacts mortality rates, but this study found intra-day variation poses a higher risk to all-cause, cardiovascular, and respiratory mortality.
  • Analyzing data from 758 locations over nearly 50 years, the researchers discovered that each increase in intra-day TV correlates with a greater increase in mortality risk compared to inter-day TV.
  • The study recommends further evaluations of the impacts of temperature variability on health, particularly focusing on intra-day fluctuations, which accounted for more than four times the mortality risk compared to inter-day variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Pollen exposure is associated with substantial respiratory morbidity, but its potential impact on cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains less understood. This study aimed to investigate the associations between daily levels of 13 pollen types and emergency department (ED) visits for eight CVD outcomes over a 26-year period in Atlanta, GA.

Methods: We acquired pollen data from Atlanta Allergy & Asthma, a nationally certified pollen counting station, and ED visit data from individual hospitals and the Georgia Hospital Association.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Short-term exposure to ground-level ozone in cities is associated with increased mortality and is expected to worsen with climate and emission changes. However, no study has yet comprehensively assessed future ozone-related acute mortality across diverse geographic areas, various climate scenarios, and using CMIP6 multi-model ensembles, limiting our knowledge on future changes in global ozone-related acute mortality and our ability to design targeted health policies. Here, we combine CMIP6 simulations and epidemiological data from 406 cities in 20 countries or regions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Older adults are generally amongst the most vulnerable to heat and cold. While temperature-related health impacts are projected to increase with global warming, the influence of population aging on these trends remains unclear. Here we show that at 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Ambient particulate matter ≤ 2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter (PM) exposure elevates the risk for cardiovascular disease morbidity (CVDM). The aim of this study is to characterise which area-level measures of socioeconomic position (SEP) modify the relationship between PM exposure and CVDM in Missouri at the census-tract (CT) level.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Short-term temperature variability, defined as the temperature range occurring within a short time span at a given location, appears to be increasing with climate change. Such variation in temperature may influence acute health outcomes, especially cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Most research on temperature variability has focused on the impact of within-day diurnal temperature range, but temperature variability over a period of a few days may also be health-relevant through its impact on thermoregulation and autonomic cardiac functioning.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Exposure to heatwaves may result in adverse human health impacts. Heat alerts in South Africa are currently based on defined temperature-fixed threshold values for large towns and cities. However, heat-health warning systems (HHWS) should incorporate metrics that have been shown to be effective predictors of negative heat-related health outcomes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Exposure to heat is associated with a substantial burden of disease and is an emerging issue in the context of climate change. Heat is of particular concern in India, which is one of the world's hottest countries and also most populous, where relatively little is known about personal heat exposure, particularly in rural areas. Here, we leverage data collected as part of a randomized controlled trial to describe personal temperature exposures of adult women (40-79 years of age) in rural Tamil Nadu.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Substance use disorder is a growing public health challenge in the United States. People who use drugs may be more vulnerable to ambient heat due to the effects of drugs on thermoregulation and their risk environment. There have been limited population-based studies of ambient temperature and drug-related morbidity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Heat-related mortality has been identified as one of the key climate extremes posing a risk to human health. Current research focuses largely on how heat mortality increases with mean global temperature rise, but it is unclear how much climate change will increase the frequency and severity of extreme summer seasons with high impact on human health. In this probabilistic analysis, we combined empirical heat-mortality relationships for 748 locations from 47 countries with climate model large ensemble data to identify probable past and future highly impactful summer seasons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Climate change will alter environmental risks that influence pulmonary health, including heat, air pollution, and pollen. These exposures disproportionately burden populations already at risk of ill health, including those at vulnerable life stages, with low socioeconomic status, and systematically targeted by oppressive policies. Climate change can exacerbate existing environmental injustices by affecting future exposure, as well as through differentials in the ability to adapt; this is compounded by disparities in rates of underlying disease and access to health care.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The World Health Organization has identified snakebite envenoming as a highest priority neglected tropical disease, yet there is a dearth of epidemiologic research on environmental risk factors, including outdoor temperature. Temperature may affect snakebites through human behavior or snake behavior; snakes are ectotherms, meaning outdoor temperatures influence their internal body temperature and thus their behavior. Here we investigate the relationship between short-term temperature and snakebites in Georgia, one of the most biodiverse US states in terms of herpetofauna.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

New methods are emerging to quantify human and animal welfare on a common scale, creating new tools for policy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Compared to many environmental risk factors, the relationship between pollen and asthma is understudied, including how associations may differ by pollen type and between subgroups, and how associations may be changing over time.

Objectives: We evaluated the association between ambient pollen concentrations and emergency department (ED) visits for asthma and wheeze in Atlanta, Georgia during 1993-2018. We estimated overall associations for 13 individual pollen taxa, as well as associations by decade, race, age (5-17, 18-64, 65+), and insurance status (Medicaid vs non-Medicaid).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF