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California and nearby Southwestern states are seeing a sustained rise in cases of valley fever, a potentially serious lung illness caused by a fungus found in desert-type soil. As a result of global warming, the areas where the fungus can thrive are expanding, researchers say.
Kate Gordon, director of Gov. Gavin Newsom's Office of Planning and Research, is tasked with identifying and mitigating the risks of climate change in California. She spoke to KHN about how that work intersects with health, and how residents can get involved.
Proposition 65 requires California businesses to label products and buildings with warnings about substances the state deems as toxic, ranging from aloe vera to asbestos. A state panel plans to debate whether to add acetaminophen, the active ingredient of common over-the-counter medications such as Tylenol, to the toxics list, raising questions about the value of these ubiquitous warnings.
Legionnaires鈥 disease cases hit an all-time high in 2018, with eight times more cases than 20 years ago. Even though many facilities in Missouri and elsewhere have water management plans in place to deal with the potentially deadly disease, they are still finding the underlying bacteria that causes it in their water.
October marks not only fire season in California, but also the peak of the grape harvest. In areas not imminently threatened by the explosive Kincade Fire in Sonoma County鈥檚 fabled vineyards, workers labored through heat and smoke, or faced lost wages.
Facing billions of dollars in legal claims for the role its equipment has played in a spate of deadly wildfires, California utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric plans to step up efforts to cut power to broad regions of the state during high-risk weather conditions. The potential for prolonged blackouts has prompted disaster preparations by hospitals, nursing homes and home care providers.
Kaiser Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
Amid forecasts for increasingly unhealthy air due to wildfire smoke, residents in Western states are snatching up home air purifiers. With good reason.
Studies long have linked urban firefighters鈥 on-the-job exposure to toxins with an increased risk of cancer. More recently, as urban-style development reaches into once remote stretches of California鈥檚 mountains and forests, wildfire crews are exposed to fuels and carcinogens more typical of urban fires. We talk with Tony Stefani of the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation about the health risks that poses for firefighters.
Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their long-awaited proposal to try to rein in prescription drug costs, even as bipartisan leaders of the other Senate committee that oversees health announced it would not bring its drug price bill to the Senate floor until fall. Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico join KHN鈥檚 Julie Rovner to discuss this, plus court actions on health issues.
Eighteen years ago, most first responders were not thinking about their future health when they spent hours searching 鈥淭he Pile鈥 for the remains of terror victims. Today, their illnesses are a slow-moving epidemiological nightmare that has been as difficult for scientists to study as it has been easy for politicians to overlook.
Some physicians say connecting the consequences of climate change 鈥 heat waves, more pollen and longer allergy seasons 鈥 to health helps them better care for patients.
Although there鈥檚 no official clinical diagnosis, the psychiatric and psychological communities have names for the phenomenon of worrying about the Earth鈥檚 fate: 鈥渃limate distress,鈥 鈥渃limate grief,鈥 鈥渃limate anxiety鈥 or 鈥渆co-anxiety.鈥 The concept also is gradually making its way into the public consciousness in television shows and movies.
Over the past decade, more than 350 workers nationwide have died from heat-related illness, and tens of thousands have had heat-related problems serious enough that they missed at least one day of work. Proposed federal legislation, modeled on California regulations, would create the first national standards for protecting workers from heat-related stress.
More than 10% of residents in 12 California counties don鈥檛 have safe drinking water, according to a California Healthline analysis of state water data. State lawmakers have pledged $130 million a year to help bring clean drinking water to Californians who need it.
For Central American migrants who follow U.S. government rules for pursuing asylum, conditions on the Mexican side of the border are sweltering, filled with anxiety and illness. Few people have a clear timetable for when it will get any better.
California officials announced a ban on chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that has been linked to lower IQs, lower birth weights and other developmental issues in children, even as the federal government fights to protect it.
He didn鈥檛 overstate the relationship between hazardous waste sites and birth defects and autism.
The pesticide chlorpyrifos has been linked to developmental problems in children. Some state and federal lawmakers want the chemical banned, but federal regulators are fighting to keep it on the market.
Scientists say drought can spur transmission of the disease and that wetter winters since 2015 have helped reduce the number of infections in California. In the long term, however, climate change could mean more drought 鈥 and more infections.
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