One Soul For Health

Food features central in any holiday season, in every one’s culture.

For Thanksgiving in the United States, food plays a huge role in the history/legend of the holiday’s origins, along with the present-day celebration of the festival.

At the same time, in and beyond the U.S., families’ finances will also be playing a central role in dinner-table conversations, shopping on the so-called “Black Friday” retail season (which has extended long before Friday 25th November), and in what’s actually served up on those tables.

Let’s connect some dots today on food, finance and health as we enter the holiday season many people will be sharing this and in the coming weeks.

Financial security, health and food were featured in a YouGov poll in April 2022 which can inform our understanding of the relationship between these factors in everyday peoples’ lives. https://business.yougov.com/content/42271-global-financial-security-and-health

The graph clearly illustrates the relationship between peoples’ perceptions of

At the recent ecoAmerica National Health and Climate Forum, I was invited to present some thoughts about self-care for those of us engaged in the climate fight.  I believe we must continuously invest in ourselves to do our best work now and to maintain this commitment over time.

For everyone involved in stopping climate change, it’s challenging not only because of the enormous complexity of the problem, but also because the rest of life doesn’t stop, with work, family, personal or health issues demanding our attention and energy at the same time.

But for those of us in health care, we get both the benefit and the burden of that added perspective. Although we’re not climate scientists, our health background allows us to understand and communicate climate change better than many.  But in addition, we truly get the extreme risks we’re running with the worsening dis-ease of nature, which

Extreme weather takes many forms: massive hurricanes, overwhelming floods, prolonged and severe droughts- but few are as harmful to as many as extreme heat. We know that high temperatures hurt some more than others: outdoor workers, those in urban heat islands, people without access to air conditioning, or those with medical conditions like asthma and cardiopulmonary disease; recent evidence also suggests heat is linked to bad birth outcomes. 

In this episode of Let’s Talk Climate, we hear from Dr. Sergio Rimola of the National Hispanic Medical Association, which represents 50,000 latino physicians across the US. Join us and hear his perspective on dealing with the heat, from how to counsel patients at risk to how to advocate effectively in our communities for policies to address climate change, turn down these temperatures, and make life better for all.

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Additional Resources

Heat Wave- Posters & Handouts

Severe Weather Drives

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the failure of levees in New Orleans, and the flooding of much of the city.

I was a college student in New Orleans in 2005 and when I think about Katrina it brings intense memories. I remember the rushed decision to evacuate, joking with friends that it would be another close miss like Hurricane Ivan the year before. Later I numbly watched CNN in a motel as a friend tried to reach his family members to confirm they were safe. I remember the mud that caked the city when I returned several weeks later to sort through the musty belongings of our second floor apartment. A year later, I sat in front-yard FEMA trailers talking with people about mold blooms keeping them out of their homes, later learning that the trailers had unsafe levels of formaldehyde. And several years after

September is National Preparedness Month and we are all aware of the growing risks. We are in the peak of hurricane season for the East Coast & Gulf South, a long wildfire season for much of the West, and deadly heat waves all over the country. These extreme weather events, along with the disruption they bring, will be increasingly frequent. This creates new challenges for us both as individuals and as healthcare workers seeking to care for our communities.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Climate, we discuss how public health can respond to these risks from Dr. Diana Hamer, the Director of Climate and Crisis Preparedness at the National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI). We learn about new programs, challenges of coordination and planning, and best practices to start preparing, as individuals, as a community, and through institutional and policy action.

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Additional Resources

National Preparedness

One in six American children have a neurological disability spanning from autism to IQ loss to ADHD. Diverse experts agree that before and after birth exposures to toxic chemicals and pollutants significantly increase kids’ risks for developing a neurodevelopmental disorder.

Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF) is an organization working to create and support initiatives that measurably reduce babies’ exposures to neurotoxic chemicals. We provide tools and resources to parents, drive policy change and research, and support municipal leaders committed to improving health.

Approximately 1 billion children worldwide are at an “extremely high risk” of the impacts of the climate crisis. A significant portion of this risk comes from exposure to air pollution.

When you consider the impact of climate change, do you consider its impact on the neurodevelopmental health of the kids in your life? In your city?

There are lots of examples of how small amounts of neurotoxic chemicals

The caption on one of my favorite cartoons reads: ”My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”

Published in the New Yorker in 2017, David Sipress aptly describes the endless stream of bad news that many of us experience daily in the world of climate change and COVID-19. As a health care worker these past few years, I’ve felt increasingly burdened by this bad news–and I’m not alone. In 2020, nearly one in every five healthcare workers quit. Many of them cited burnout and significant pay cuts with increased risk to their health and the health of their families. For several, this was compounded by a baseline, pre-pandemic state of emotional exhaustion. As stories of worldwide death and devastation from the pandemic swirled around us, we watched patients suffer in front of us. We also saw historic inequalities become glaringly

ecoAmerica’s most recent contribution to the National Environmental Health Association’s Journal of Environmental Health, “The United Nations, Climate Change, Environmental Health, and You” by Nicole Hill, MPH, and Bob Perkowitz is now available in the October 2022 issue.

The leading authority globally on climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the United Nations. Every 5 years, the panel releases an extensive 3-part assessment on climate change that explores the science, the impacts, and the solutions. In February 2022, IPCC released findings from Working Group II as part of its Sixth Assessment Report. The Working Group II report—3,675 pages long itself—focused on climate change impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities. So, what do these findings mean for environmental health and you?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

This past month, I attended my first United Nations General Assembly in New York. As a UN Liaison for Sigma Nursing, I was granted special access to the assembly hall where world leaders gathered to discuss challenges we face as a global community. Climate change was a common concern. I listened intently as leaders from across the globe enumerated the negative effects of climate change (such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and flooding) to their countries.

Sigma Nursing UN Liaison Janice Hawkins at the UN General Assembly

I also attended a General Assembly side event on Sustainable Surgical Systems and Planetary Health. The guest of honor, Prime Minister Bainimarama of Fiji, opened the event by sharing his concerns for the impact of sea level rise. Prime Minister Bainimarama has frequently called on the support of the world to help address urgent issues of climate change. Parts of Fiji are