North America – Page 31 – Desdemona Despair

Distance women must travel to receive abortion services after anti-abortion trigger laws go into effect, 24 June 2022. At the start of June 2022, nearly all women in America lived within a few hours’ drive of an abortion clinic. But with Roe v. Wade overturned, and the constitutional right to an abortion ended, clinics are quickly closing in huge swaths of the country. a quarter of U.S. women of reproductive age could have to travel more than 200 miles to obtain a legal abortion. Under the farthest-reaching scenarios, that number could rise to nearly half. Graphic: The New York Times

June 25, 2022

Digital surveillance in a nation of criminalized healthcare – Here’s a list of online healthcare resources as access to abortion in U.S. plummets

25 June 2022 (Desdemona Despair) – In the new era of criminalized health care, law enforcement agencies that are investigating abortion-related cases can use an American’s location data, messages, and search histories as evidence against them. Anybody who comes in contact with a pregnant woman in the U.S. potentially faces prosecution if an abortion-related case […]

Life expectancies across congressional districts in the United States, 2010-2015. Graphic: Takai, et al., 2022 / Social Science and Medicine

June 16, 2022

Graph of the Day: Life expectancy by U.S. congressional district, 2010–2015

25 March 2022 (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) – Researchers at the Harvard Geographic Insights Lab have launched the first-ever dashboard that tracks life expectancy on the U.S. congressional district level. The dashboard was released in conjunction with a 12 March 2022 paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health co-authors of […]

Lake Mead water levels, 2017-2022. Graphic: Water-Data.com

June 7, 2022

Drought-stricken U.S. warned of looming “dead pool” – “It’s like watching this slow-motion catastrophe kind of unfold”

By Regan Morris and Sophie Long 4 June 2022 LOS ANGELES (BBC News) – A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries. Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover […]

Map showing spatial extent of heavy labor losses due to humid heat. Per capita heavy labor lost (a)–(c) and population-weighted heavy labor lost (d)–(f) for the Lancet Countdown method ('LCHCC', (a), (d)) and the laboratory exposure response to heat ('Laboratory', (b), (e)). Panels on right show the zonal median (c) and zonal sums (f) of heavy labor losses. Maps in the top row show mean h person−1 yr−1 lost due to background heat and humidity combined with internal heat generation in individuals conducting heavy labor. Maps in the bottom row display 'population-weighted' labor loss, which is defined as the product of the mean per-capita hours lost overlaid and the ILO heavy labor sector proportion of the working-age population (ages 15+) for 163 countries for which the data are available. Shading around zonal median (top right) and zonal sum (bottom right) lines outlines the range of zonal values for individual years. Graphic: Parsons, et al., 2022 / Environmental Research Letters

May 30, 2022

India’s savage heat exacts heaviest toll on outdoor workers – Humid heat causes 650 billion hours of annual lost labor globally, up at least 9 percent over four decades – “This is not just exhaustion or discomfort. It is actually killing people.”

By Anjana Pasricha 23 May 2022 NEW DELHI (VOA News) – Pradeep Kumar can earn nearly eight dollars a day selling the traditional Indian drink with cumin and lemon that he makes at his cart in a popular market in New Delhi — supposed to cool the body, the beverage has been much in demand […]

Pierce County drug poisoning deaths, January 2018–April 2021. Many of Pierce county's recent drug poisoning deaths included more than one drug. In 2019, Pierce County drug poisoning deaths were flattening along with state and were trending downward. However, drug poisoning deaths have risen dramatically in 2020 and 2021 despite increased harm reduction efforts, relaxed drug charges and relaxed Medications for Opioid Use disorder (MOUD) prescribing practices. Pierce County’s heroin deaths outpaced the State (comparison not shown). The number of heroin-involved deaths may be higher, since the body might metabolize heroin before labs detect it. Whites and males had the most poisoning deaths. Groups experiencing structural racism and inequitable health outcomes had the highest rates of poisoning deaths. These groups include American Indian/Alaska Natives, Hispanic/Latinx, and Black/African Americans. Deaths involving illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, continued to surge into 2021. Locally, illicit drug makers and distributors add fentanyl to counterfeit prescription pills, tar heroin, and powders like methamphetamine without users’ knowledge. As a result, fentanyl is cheaper, easier to obtain, gets users hooked more quickly and keeps them coming back for larger doses. Both Pierce County and the State have experienced dramatic increases in poisoning deaths involving methamphetamine and other stimulants in 2020 and 2021, to which Naloxone (an emergency opioid blocker) doesn’t respond. Graphic: TPCHD

May 29, 2022

“Deaths Of Despair” on the rise in Pierce County, WA – “COVID-19 has been hard on everyone”

By Charles Woodman27 May 2022 TACOMA, WA (Patch) – The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department is reminding everyone: help is available if you need it. In an update Friday, the health department reported that deaths from suicide, alcohol or drug misuse had climbed from 351 in 2019 to 423 in 2020, and these “deaths of despair” […]

Veldarin Jackson, Sr., center, talks about receiving the call that his mother, Janice Reed, had died as his wife Adjoa Jackson, left, becomes emotional, Tuesday, 24 May 2022, in Chicago. Reed was one of the three senior victims who died in a Rogers Park building where residents complained of heat. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office has yet to determine the causes of death for the three women on 14 May 2022. Photo: Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune / AP

May 29, 2022

Deaths of 3 Chicago women in early 2022 heat wave raise questions, fears – “Hotter and more dangerous heat waves are coming earlier, in May, and we are getting older, and more people are living alone. It’s a formula for disaster.”

By Don Babwin 28 May 2022 CHICAGO (AP) – Temperatures barely climbed into the 90s and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed after a […]

Elena Mendoza, 18, grieves in front of a cross honoring her cousin, Amerie Jo Garza, one of the victims killed in the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, 26 May 2022. Photo: Jae C. Hong / AP Photo

May 27, 2022

Gun violence now Number 1 cause of death for U.S. children – “The fact that this is the leading cause of death among kids is obscene”

By Mary Kekatos 25 May 2022 (ABC News) – The mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday has put the spotlight back on recent data showing that firearm injuries are the No. 1 cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. A total of 19 children, mainly third and fourth […]

Map showing percent change in predicted 12 month-ending count of drug overdose Deaths, by U.S. jurisdiction, December 2020 - December 2021. Graphic: CDC / National Center for Health Statistics

May 11, 2022

U.S. surpasses record 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021 – “2022 will probably be as horrible as 2021 was, quite possibly worse”

By Meryl Kornfield 11 May 2022 (The Washington Post) – More Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021 than any previous year, a grim milestone in an epidemic that has now claimed 1 million lives in the 21st century, according to federal data released Wednesday. More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, […]

Russia tree cover loss, 2001-2021. The rate of loss in in boreal forests reached unprecedented levels in 2021, increasing by 29 percent over 2020. An unprecedented fire season in Russia drove much of this increase. Russia experienced the worst fire season since record-keeping began in 2001, with more than 6.5 million hectares of tree cover loss in 2021. While fires are a natural part of boreal forest ecosystems, larger, more intense fires are worrying. Hotter, drier weather related to climate change has led to fire-prone conditions, drier peatlands and melted permafrost. Siberia’s vast peatland area — the largest in the world — stores massive amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when peat dries up. Melting permafrost also releases stored carbon and methane. These conditions may represent a new normal, impacting people living in Siberia and creating a feedback loop in which increasing fires and carbon emissions reinforce each other and lead to worsening conditions. Graphic: WRI

May 8, 2022

Vast forest losses in 2021 imperil global climate targets, report says – “We’re seeing fires burning more frequently, more intensively and more broadly than they ever would under normal conditions”

By Jake Spring 28 April 2022 SAO PAULO, April 28 (Reuters) – The world lost an area of forest the size of the U.S. state of Wyoming last year, as wildfires in Russia set all-time records and Brazilian deforestation of the Amazon remains high, a global forest monitoring project report said on Thursday. Global Forest Watch, which […]

Global distribution of estimated excess mortality rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for the cumulative period 2020–21. Although reported COVID-19 deaths between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 totaled 5.94 million worldwide, IHME estimates that 18.2 million (95 percent uncertainty interval 17.1–19.6) people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic over that period, as measured by excess mortality. Graphic: Wang, et al., 2022 / The Lancet

May 7, 2022

WHO estimates nearly 15 million deaths associated with COVID-19, more than double the official toll – “When you have a massive outbreak where people are dying in the streets because of a lack of oxygen, we end up never knowing just how many people died”

By Maria Cheng 5 May 2022 LONDON (AP) – The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 15 million people were killed either by coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems during the first two years of the pandemic, more than double the current official death toll of over 6 million. Most of the […]