Connecticut Green Living

When I stayed with my late mother in South Texas in 2016, there was a Zika Virus * scare, and so even sweeping the back porch was a fraught exercise in mosquito dodgeball. I remember scurrying about so fast that I likely made more of a mess than I helped. Spending summers in South Texas at my grandmother's, I was always mosquito-bite ridden. It was annoying, I itched, but I was young. Remember youth? We were never going to get really sick, much less die. But these days I take, and you should take, the threats posed by mosquitoes and ticks very seriously. ............................ SciLine, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently hosted a panel of scientists to discuss said threats ("Ticks, Mosquitoes and Rising Disease Risk"). Some of the takeaways were that climate change can, but does not necessarily portend, the deletirious effects of mosquito and tick season on a population. Interestingly, changes in land use also play huge facto...

If you are surviving the "heat dome", that's wonderful, but if you are thriving you must be locked in a meat cooler somewhere. Yesterday , I had to walk several blocks because of the arts festival in downtown New Haven, and became intimately familiar with the 'heat index'. It felt like 104 according to the heat index, which factors in humidity, even though it was in the 90s. There was not an inch of clothing that was not doused in sweat when I arrived at my destination. I then slept a solid 12 hours. Dangerous weather such as we are having is nothing to take lightly. I reported Friday that the CDC documented over 700 annual U.S. deaths between 2004 and 2018. I can only imagine that from 2024 forward, that number will spike considerably. U.S. News & World Report just reported that Phoenix has suffered six heat-related deaths as its temps have soared to 115 in recent days. One hundred fifteen degrees. The only upside is humidity is low (as I write, it is 107...

During 2004–2018, an average of 702 heat-related deaths (415 with heat as the underlying cause and 287 as a contributing cause) occurred in the United States annually, according to the CDC in its "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report". In it the CDC states that natural heat exposure was a "contributing cause of death attributed to certain chronic medical conditions, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdoses." But it is not 2018 anymore, and heat deaths along with extreme heat, are accelerating. (As if on cue, a few hours after I published this the BBC and CNN reported that 1,000 persons have died from the heat on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.) At least as importantly, areas with high humidity such as ours - particularly over the past several days - are fraught this time of year. The higher the humidity, the less we are able to sweat and cool ourselves. CDC's health scientist Ambarish Vaidyanathan, of the Climate and Health Program with the National Center for Envi...

As you probably know by now, the world is facing a pandemic in the form of Covid-19 whose course is uncertain except for the assurity that it will get worse before it gets better. According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, if contracted it is 20 times as lethal as the flu, even though the annual flu is more pervasive. The older you are, the greater the chance that you will develop the most severe symptoms. Most people will not die from the virus if contracted, but so much is still unknown, as Dr. Gupta would be the first to say. I have looked at the maps and see that Africa, for example, obviously must have more cases of the virus than are shown. I also reckon that many people may be symptomatic and not reporting, either due to naivety, inability to report (perhaps they are in remote locations or there are financial/language barriers to their being able to report), or fear of being ostracized. The best place to find information about the Covid-19 pandemic (also called Coronavirus) is...