At a particular time in Nigeria around early March to April, you would hear people say that the excessively hot weather can be responsible for a lot of illnesses and they will continually mention Iba (yoruba) meaning malaria. They always say it with conviction that the heat wave is the cause for the excessive mosquitoes ad the activeness of the mosquitoes and the same heat affects the immune system thereby causing us to be susceptible but this isn't true for some neighborhoods especially those who have access to modern amenities. Also, I did see publications supporting the fact that warmer or hotter temperature can increase the development rate of mosquito and its transmission. That said, does the environment affect our health in anyway?
In 1995, there was a heat wave in Chicago which halted the entire activity if the city as it heat index reached 126 degrees Fahrenheit or 52 degrees Celsius. As you would expect, residents opted to use their air conditioning the electrical use spiked and this led to power outage in the city. This incident led to a mirage of problems because people were not ready for it. Hospitals were full and there were a lot of people to be carried to the emergency unit that ambulances could not function properly at a time.
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The heat wave in Chicago lasted a week, leading to the death of 739 people whose cause of death were heat related complications. Maps looking at Chicago at the time showed that certain environments were affected more than others and the death toll was higher in those places. The same region were also the ones affected the most during the Covid-19 in Chicago.
When we look at our health, one area we are fast to neglect is our immediate environment. While your body is your body, it doesn't survive alone. It needs support from other places including oxygen, water, and many more which comes from our environment. In simple terms, we are biological machines that use needful stuffs in our environment for survival but just like it takes them when the conditions are good, it can also be affected when the conditions are bad.
We refer to this a the environmental determinants of health which can either be natural or built by ourselves and these two come together to affect our health. While some things are naturally made, they can have human influence on these things such as water. While we breath in oxygen we also breath in a lot of things that are affected by both natural and human made aerosols.
Inhaling particular matter which are too small to be seen with the eyes, coming from things like car exhaust, construction sites, and factories also affect our health. They are responsible for a lot of airborne pollution. These particular matter can stay long in the air and travel a long way, this is why smoke from California can travel a long way to New York.
It is common to see children living in areas close to busy roads where there are fumes and other air pollutant suffer from negative respiratory disease. A study carried out in North America showed that people living in busy areas, live not far from the road, and the world health organization showed that 99% of global population breath in air pollutants that is beyond the guideline limits of outdoor air pollution contributing to 4.2 million deaths yearly.
Air pollution can both be outdoors and indoors, and talking about indoors, our cooking and cleaning do a lot of pollution and releasing of harmful particles into the air which can affect our health. Simple things like using a cooking gas can release chemicals that we do not expect, also another simple act like baking a cake in an oven in the house can release Nitrogen dioxide which is a potentially dangerous gas and it can release it at a very high amount beyond the recommended value.
If we leave air and go to water, we humans are a major drive to pollution of water. Things as simple as disposing bottles in the rivers and oceans to oil spills in oceans, these are affecting our environment. Other human effects that affects our environment which also can contribute to health issues includes the washing of fertilizers into water bodies which eventually gets into our tap.
Back to heat, we know that in the last 2 decades, human activities has led to an increase in the pace of climatic change than before, following the increased climate change scientists are saying that if this continues , we might be seeing heat waves up to about 3 times yearly which means a lot of people will be affected, and people living in warmer regions will feel this more.
Reference
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/climate-change-and-malaria-complex-relationship
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo20809880.html
https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/klinenberg.pdf
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/443213in.html
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2491/10-interesting-things-about-air/
https://www.healtheffects.org/system/files/SR17TrafficReview_Exec_Summary.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK361807/
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-speed-080113.html
https://rmi.org/insight/gas-stoves-pollution-health/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740125/
https://southsideweekly.com/city-extremes-1995-heat-wave-covid-19-reveal-whats-changed-hasnt-chicagos-health-equity-landscape/
https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/particulate-matter-pm-basics
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2019/07/killer-heat-analysis-full-report.pdf
https://www.webcms.pima.gov/UserFiles/Servers/Server_6
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forever-chemicals-are-widespread-in-u-s-drinking-water/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/