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We greatly appreciate the alternative framing and call to action posed by Ivey, Pruitt, and Garcia (1) in response to our commentary. (2) We agree that the available evidence strongly [...]

BACKGROUND: Recently enacted environmental justice policies in the United States at the state and federal level emphasize addressing place-based inequities, including persistent disparities in air pollution exposure and associated health impacts. Advances in air quality measurement, models, and analytic methods have demonstrated the importance of finer-scale data and analysis in accurately quantifying the extent of inequity in intraurban pollution exposure, although the necessary degree of spatial resolution remains a complex and context-dependent question. OBJECTIVE: The objectives of this commentary were to a) discuss ways to maximize and evaluate the effectiveness of efforts to reduce air pollution disparities, and b) argue that environmental regulators must employ improved methods to project, measure, and track the distributional impacts of new policies at finer geographic and temporal scales. DISCUSSION: The historic federal investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Biden Administration's commitment to Justice40 present an unprecedented opportunity to advance climate and energy policies that deliver real reductions in pollution-related health inequities. In our opinion, scientists, advocates, policymakers, and implementing agencies must work together to harness critical advances in air quality measurements, models, and analytic methods to ensure success. https://doi.org/ 10.1289/EHP13063, Introduction Twenty-three states and the federal government have enacted environmental justice policies since the 1990s, but only recently have significant resources been allocated at both state and federal levels. Currently, [...]

BACKGROUND: The Deepwater Horizon (DH) blowout resulted in fisheries closings across the Gulf of Mexico. Federal agencies, in collaboration with impacted Gulf states, developed a protocol to determine when it [...]

BACKGROUND: The growing health risks associated with greenhouse gas emissions highlight the need for new energy policies that emphasize efficiency and low-carbon energy intensity. OBJECTIVES: We assessed the relationships among [...]

Background: Environmental heat exposure is a public health concern. The impacts of environmental heat on mortality and morbidity at the population scale are well documented, but little is known about specific exposures that individuals experience. Objectives: The first objective of this work was to catalyze discussion of the role of personal heat exposure information in research and risk assessment. The second objective was to provide guidance regarding the operationalization of personal heat exposure research methods. DISCUSSION: We define personal heat exposure as realized contact between a person and an indoor or outdoor environment that poses a risk of increases in body core temperature and/or perceived discomfort. Personal heat exposure can be measured directly with wearable monitors or estimated indirectly through the combination of time-activity and meteorological data sets. Complementary information to understand individual-scale drivers of behavior, susceptibility, and health and comfort outcomes can be collected from additional monitors, surveys, interviews, ethnographic approaches, and additional social and health data sets. Personal exposure research can help reveal the extent of exposure misclassification that occurs when individual exposure to heat is estimated using ambient temperature measured at fixed sites and can provide insights for epidemiological risk assessment concerning extreme heat. CONCLUSIONS: Personal heat exposure research provides more valid and precise insights into how often people encounter heat conditions and when, where, to whom, and why these encounters occur. Published literature on personal heat exposure is limited to date, but existing studies point to opportunities to inform public health practice regarding extreme heat, particularly where fine-scale precision is needed to reduce health consequences of heat exposure. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP556, Introduction Environmental heat is a natural and anthropogenically enhanced hazard with well-documented adverse impacts on human health and well-being (Gasparrini et al. 2015; Parsons 2014). Despite decades of physiological, epidemiological, [...]

We explore the relationship between current research directions in human health and environmental and public health policy. Specifically, we suggest there is a link between the continuing emphasis in biomedical research on individualized, therapeutic solutions to human disease and the increased reliance on individual choice in response to environmental and/or public health threats. We suggest that continued research emphasis on these traditional approaches to the exclusion of other approaches will impede the discovery of important breakthroughs in human health research necessary to understand the emerging diseases of today. We recommend redirecting research programs to interdisciplinary and population-focused research that would support a systems approach to fully identifying the environmental factors that contribute to disease burden. Such an approach would be able to address the interactions between the social, ecological, and physical aspects of our environment and explicitly include these in the evaluation and management of health risks from environmental exposures. Key words: public health, risk assessment, systems biology. Environ Health Perspect 115:1261-1263 (2007). doi:10.1289/ehp.10373 available via http://dx.doi.org/ [Online 28 June 2007], The current generation of children in many countries have a shorter life expectancy than their parents' generation, mainly due to changing sociopolitical systems and infectious diseases such as AIDS (World [...]

BACKGROUND: A deeper understanding of how heat wave definition affects the relationship between heat exposure and health, especially as a function of rurality, will be useful in developing effective heat wave warning systems. OBJECTIVE: We compared the relationships between different heat wave index (HI) definitions and preterm birth (PTB) and nonaccidental death (NAD) across urban and rural areas. METHODS: We used a time-stratified case-crossover design to estimate associations of PTB and NAD with heat wave days (defined using 15 His) relative to non-heat wave control days in Alabama, USA (1990--2010). ZIP code--level His were derived using data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System. Associations with heat wave days defined using different His were compared by bootstrapping. We also examined interactions with rurality. RESULTS: Associations varied depending on the HI used to define heat wave days. Heat waves defined as having at least 2 consecutive days with mean daily temperatures above the 98th percentile were associated with 32.4% (95% CI: 3.7, 69.1%) higher PTB, and heat waves defined as at least 2 consecutive days with mean daily temperatures above the 90th percentile were associated with 3.7% (95% CI: 1.1, 6.3%) higher NAD. Results suggest that significant positive associations were more common when relative--compared with absolute--HIs were used to define exposure. Both positive and negative associations were found in each rurality stratum. However, all stratum-specific significant associations were positive, and NAD associations with heat waves were consistently positive in urban strata but not in middle or rural strata. CONCLUSIONS: Based on our findings, we conclude that a relative mean-temperature-only heat wave definition may be the most effective metric for heat wave warning systems in Alabama., Introduction Climate change is expected to result in more frequent, more intense, and longer heat waves (Meehl and Tebaldi 2004). Increased mortality associated with heat waves is well documented (Basu [...]

Energy policies are in transition worldwide based on a convergence of factors including static oil production coupled with increased demand, a desire for energy independence, and growing awareness of climate [...]