Healthbeat

Climate change is delaying the arrival of spring in NYC parks, researchers find

2025-08-26T14:53:23+00:00

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As climate change drives warmer winters, environmental scientists have long expected to see spring arrive earlier. But Yale University researchers analyzing satellite imagery of New York City parks found the opposite: Spring is starting later.

“This is completely a flip, and also contrary to our expectations, because you would think that if it’s warmer, the leaf-out would be earlier,” said Dr. Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of the Environment.

In the study, published July 30 in Environmental Research Letters, Seto and other researchers analyzed the start of the growing season at 379 parks across New York City, comparing trends between 2000 to 2009 and 2013 to 2022. Researchers focused on how the impacts of climate change and the urban heat island effect — how a city’s heat-absorbing buildings, roads and infrastructure increase its overall temperature — shape the temperature of green spaces.

Access to parks is linked to positive public health effects, including reductions in blood pressure, heart rate, and all-cause mortality, as well as decreases in psychological stress. And in cities like New York, parks have a key role to play in cooling streets and absorbing atmospheric CO2.

How connecting with nature helps Black women have healthier pregnancies

When it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change, Yale researchers found that the size of the park matters. They analyzed parks ranging from large green spaces like Central Park and Prospect Park, to medium-sized ones like Bryant Park and Madison Square Park, to even smaller, playground-sized spaces.

In the smallest parks, temperatures inside and outside the green spaces are similar, said Dr. Juwon Kong, a postdoctoral associate and the study’s lead author. Big, sprawling parks, which are more protected against the urban heat island effect, are not only cooler internally, but can also cool the surrounding area, he said.

“Larger parks’ cooling effects can be extended at least one or two blocks,” Kong said.

Medium-sized parks are most vulnerable to the impacts of the urban heat island effect, researchers found, since they have less of a buffer between their interiors and surrounding infrastructure.

Analyzing detailed satellite imagery of the parks, researchers found that the delayed onset of spring was most significant in medium-sized parks. For those parks — ranging in size from one hectare (about 2.5 acres) to 18 hectares (about 45 acres) — the average start of spring was delayed by 2.62 to 4.43 days.

In smaller parks, of less than one hectare, researchers recorded an average delay of spring of 0.90 days. And in the biggest parks, of more than 18 hectares, researchers recorded that the average arrival of spring was delayed by about 1.41 days.

The delay of spring reflects a disruption of the precise physiological mechanisms that govern a tree’s transition from bare branches to new growth, Kong said. Trees in temperate regions typically require sufficient winter chilling to transition from dormancy to leaf growth, but warmer winters shift that balance, pushing back the arrival of spring.

Seto said that it is not clear if delayed springs will continue in coming years, or what their long-term consequences could be.

“Having the shorter and shorter growing season means less time for leaf-out, less shade, less cooling, less habitat,” Seto said. “I think there’s unknown questions about what the domino effects are on the composition of different vegetation and the health of trees.”

In the near term, though, the findings have implications for the management of green spaces in New York City, and perhaps other cities, she said. For instance, the findings might help inform tree-planting strategies that maximize cooling benefits.

The research, Seto said, “helps us think about ways in which we can better manage the green space in cities so that they can thrive in a hotter and hotter climate and be more resilient.”

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

Atlanta researchers develop wearable sensor to help outdoor workers stay safe in heat

2025-07-17T13:35:42+00:00

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Growing up as the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador, Roxana Chicas heard horror stories about what the heat could do to construction workers like her stepfather.

Stories of a worker who got dizzy and fell off a roof, a farmworker who fainted in the field and was run over by a tractor trailer, and the daily challenges of working outdoors under a “blazing sun” inspired Chicas to devote her career to researching the impacts of heat on the body.

“I remember those stories and carry them with me in everything that I do now,” said Chicas, an assistant professor of nursing at Emory University in Atlanta. She and a team of researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a new device to help outdoor workers monitor how heat is affecting their bodies and collect data to better understand the effects.

People who do intense physical labor in high temperatures and become dehydrated are at risk of kidney damage. The new device, a two-inch patch worn on the chest, measures those indicators and alerts wearers to take a break and rehydrate. The sensor, which connects to the wearer’s phone via Bluetooth, tracks physical activity, oxygenation rate, respiration rate, heart rate, and skin temperature.

Summer heat is felt unevenly across metro Atlanta. Experts say more data is needed to address the public health threat.

The project, funded by a five-year, $2.46 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, developed from Chicas’ research with farmworker groups in Florida.

“Many farmworkers work in rural communities. They are often unseen, but they are often at the front lines of climate change,” Chicas said. “Oftentimes workers will push themselves to continue working … they just feel like they have to power through.”

But that could seriously damage their bodies or lead to heatstroke, she said. Chicas and other scientists have identified associations among outdoor work, dehydration, and physically intense labor and acute kidney injury, although they don’t fully understand the physiological mechanisms behind that. Repeated multiple times, acute kidney injury can cause chronic kidney injury, she said.

Dr. Roxana Chicas, an assistant professor of nursing at Emory University in Atlanta, worked with a team of researchers from Georgia Tech to develop a device to help outdoor workers monitor how heat is affecting their bodies.

Heat is a public health problem, with farmworkers 35 times more likely than others to die from heat-related causes, according to a 2016 study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. A 2018 study in Lancet Planet Health found that 15% of people who worked under heat stress experienced kidney disease or acute kidney injury.

Earlier this year, the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and 86 other organizations sent a letter to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration urging it to finalize heat protections for workers.

Besides kidney damage, heat can cause respiratory problems, and it’s been associated with higher rates of preterm births and low birthweight.

The idea for the sensor came from Chicas’ community-based research with a mostly Spanish-speaking farmworker population in Florida and Georgia. Georgia had about 44,000 farmworkers in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture.

Chicas and her team asked the workers to name their top concern, expecting the answer to be pesticides. The workers said it was heat.

“They started talking about how hot it is, how they feel like it gets hotter every year … They just don’t know how to consider exactly what’s happening, but they feel different,” Chicas said.

The heat monitoring patch is designed to be worn on the chest.

That response launched her team down a path of multiple smaller studies to better understand what was going on. One study found farmworkers’ core body temperatures after work reached 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and higher, which significantly increases the risk of heatstroke, Chicas said.

They found that a cooling bandana around the neck can provide better relief than a cooling vest, and that workers who drank 5 liters of water with electrolytes did not get dehydrated, while workers who drank the same amount of plain water did.

Chicas said the heat sensor project will use machine learning to mine and analyze data from the sensors. Most workers have smartphones, she said, and are eager to try new things.

Community groups that work with farm laborers in Florida recruited a group of 18 volunteers to try out the sensor in July 2021. In exchange, the study organizers provided the workers with detailed health data, including cholesterol, blood sugar, kidney function, and other indicators.

“They have said to us that that’s the number one reason why they participate, because they want to know about their health, because many of them do not have access to health care,” Chicas said.

Cristian Estrada, South Georgia organizer for the Latino Community Fund of Georgia, said the farmworkers he works with aren’t guaranteed breaks. Their working hours have shifted earlier and earlier, so they can finish before the heat of midday, which can reach an average of 95 degrees in July, according to the National Weather Service.

Estrada said he likes the idea of a sensor to help workers and highlight the problems faced by farmworkers.

“It’s a great way to just find out more about a community that’s underlooked,” Estrada said.

Chicas and her team want to see the product on the market – at an affordable price – within the next year or two.

“This is a population that really is the backbone of the food industry and really requires some attention from us to help them stay healthy so that they can continue being the backbone of the food industry,” Chicas said.

She said she wants to see greater federal and state protections for outdoor workers.

“We’ve all agreed we don’t want people dying in the fields,” she said.

Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.

NY health update: Zohran Mamdani’s proposals, help for asthma in the heat, Pride month resources

2025-06-27T11:00:00+00:00

This article originally appeared at Your Local Epidemiologist New York. Sign up for the YLE NY newsletter here. Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat’s free New York City newsletter here.

With so much going on, taking breaks and recharging are key to preventing burnout. We’ll be taking next week off to do just that.

But before we sign off, here’s your dose of New York health news.

Zohran Mamdani wins NYC mayoral Democratic primary

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded to state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday night. New Yorkers will vote in the general election in November to determine the next New York City mayor.

I highlighted some of Mamdani’s health-related plans in our Mayoral Primary Voter Guide earlier this month. To recap, Mamdani’s proposals include:

Establishing a Department of Community Safety, backed by $1.1 billion in funding, that aims to prevent violence and strengthen social safety nets. This program would invest ~$350M in mental health services, expanding preventive and ongoing mental care, as well as crisis intervention for severe mental illness through increasing the number of mobile crisis teams.
Creating city-funded grocery stores to improve healthy food access and combat food insecurity.
Providing new parents with baby baskets that contain essential goods and resources, like diapers and baby wipes, and information on newborn home visiting programs, breastfeeding, and postpartum depression.

We’ll be back with more info as we get closer to the general election.

Free AC program for those with asthma

We just made it through our first heat wave of the year, with temps across the state hitting 100°F. While next week looks cooler, more extreme heat is likely in the weeks ahead. In addition to last week’s heat safety tips, there’s now a new resource available to help New Yorkers manage heat-related health risks.

Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul launched the Essential Plan Cooling Program, which offers free air conditioners to eligible New Yorkers. Specifically, it’s for those enrolled in the Essential Plan (New York’s Medicaid expansion) who also have persistent asthma. This program is different from the Home Energy Assistance Program. The application and additional details are available here.

Why asthma? Hot, humid weather is a known trigger of asthma symptoms. It also increases ozone in the air (smog), which can trigger asthma. Heat speeds up the chemical reaction that creates ozone, so air is often smoggier on hot days.

There are things you can do to prepare for the heat if you have asthma:

Check the air quality, temperature, and humidity using airnow.gov before you go outside. If air pollution or temperature is high, limit how much you’re out.
Stay hydrated. Drinking water can help cool the mucus in your lungs and airways.
Always have your medication on hand.
Use a HEPA air filter to reduce pollution indoors.
Prepare for power outages, which can be caused by excessive heat. If you use a nebulizer, oxygen concentrator, or other electronic medical device, have a backup plan with your health care team for what to do in the event of a power outage.

A win for SNAP

Over the weekend, a bill moving through Congress proposing to cut $128 billion in federal funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, failed to meet Senate requirements. This means the bill can’t move forward with the cuts — good news for the nearly 3 million people in New York who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

The bill would have required states to shoulder at least 5% of SNAP benefit costs, substantially slashing federal support. Because the bill is moving through a special “budget reconciliation process,” it must follow certain rules. The Senate parliamentarian (essentially a non-partisan referee) evaluated the bill and determined that the SNAP cuts didn’t meet the criteria. They also determined that another part of the bill, a proposal to bar non-citizens from receiving SNAP benefits, didn’t meet the criteria. That means that immigrants who qualify for SNAP, regardless of immigration status, can still receive benefits.

In New York City alone, 1.8 million people rely on SNAP. Statewide, nearly 1 in 7 residents depend on it — 30% of recipients are children, and 21% are elderly people. Since the pandemic, the number of New Yorkers needing food assistance has mostly grown.

SNAP isn’t just a lifeline for feeding families, it also adds to the economy. Every $1 spent on SNAP generates an estimated $1.54 in economic activity. This means that the $7.4 billion spent on the program in New York annually generates about $11.5 billion in economic activity.

While this win is meaningful, it’s not final. Lawmakers will likely look for alternative means to fund tax cuts, potentially affecting SNAP down the line.

Medicare Advantage update for NYC retirees

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams stated that ~250,000 retired city workers would not be switched from traditional Medicare to privatized Medicare Advantage plans. The original plan to switch city workers to private Medicare Advantage was proposed to save the city about $600 million annually. However, it garnered significant criticism.

Medicare Advantage is a type of Medicare plan offered by private insurance companies, approved by Medicare. While it can offer additional benefits like dental, vision, and hearing coverage, it has some drawbacks:

Limited networks. Fewer doctors and hospitals accept these plans.
Pre-approvals for care. Services often require prior authorization.
Potential for higher out-of-pocket costs. Plans may have lower up-front premiums, but can lead to higher out-of-pocket costs depending on the services needed.

Because of these drawbacks, many retirees raised concerns and pushed back against the Medicare Advantage plans. With this change, City Hall will now continue to look for other ways to save money on health care.

Pride month resources, and a mental health update

New York has been celebrating Pride for the past month, from the Capital Pride Parade in Albany to Rainbow City in Niagara Falls. And there’s still more ahead — the New York City annual Pride March and PrideFest are this Saturday.

To safely celebrate, the New York City and New York state health departments have put together resources and recommendations, including spending time with community, practicing safe sex (including PrEP and PEP), and checking in on mental health.

LGBTQ+ individuals often face unique mental health challenges, driven by factors like family rejection, discrimination, or social isolation. These stressors have tragically contributed to higher suicide rates in this community.

Since 2022, the national 988 suicide hotline has provided an option for LGBTQ+ callers to be connected to specially trained counselors who share similar life experiences to offer support. But last week, the federal government ended this specialized support to cut costs.

It’s important to know the 988 line is still active and available to everyone. But this loss in dedicated support for the LGBTQ+ community is a step in the wrong direction for addressing mental health a high-risk population.

For LGBTQ+-specific mental health services, the following hotlines are still available:

The Trevor Project provides national, 24/7 crisis care for LGBTQ+ young people. Call (866-488-7386), text (678-678), or chat from anywhere in the United States.
The Trans Lifeline is a national, English/Spanish hotline (877-565-8860) offering peer support phone service for trans people.
NYC Teenspace is a free mental health support program available to any teenager age 13 to 17 living in New York City. It connects teens to licensed therapists for ongoing support.
The NYC Anti-violence Project offers an English/Spanish hotline (212-714-1141) that can connect callers with trained counselors specializing in LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected mental health.

Covid-19 activity remains low in New York

The summer wave I’m expecting still hasn’t taken off in New York. Both wastewater and hospitalizations data show that Covid-19 activity is still low across the state. Though I do anticipate things will pick up soon.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on things and report back with updates.

Bottom line

You’re all caught up with New York health this week! See you after our break next week.

Love,

Your NY Epi

Dr. Marisa Donnelly, PhD, is an epidemiologist, science communicator, and public health advocate. She specializes in infectious diseases, outbreak response, and emerging health threats. She has led multiple outbreak investigations at the California Department of Public Health and served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Donnelly is also an epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, where she works at the forefront of wastewater-based disease surveillance.

NYC buildings trap heat. ‘Cool roofs’ program aims to lower temperature inside.

2025-06-25T11:00:00+00:00

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat’s free New York City newsletter here.

Mehdi Heris, a professor at CUNY’s Hunter College, has dedicated his research to bridging the gaps between science and urban planning. As New York City enters another scorching summer, he wants more people to know about a way to lower indoor temperatures by up to 5.9°F: “cool roofs.”

The practice, which involves covering rooftops in a light-reflective coating, had been implemented on at least 36% of the city’s roofs, according to Heris’ research. He has been tracking the efforts of NYC CoolRoofs and The HOPE Program, a job training non-profit focused on sustainability, to cool more of the city’s 1.6 billion square feet of rooftops.

“It is basically low-hanging fruit for communities to start with cool roofs for heat mitigation,” Heris said, citing the free or low-cost program that would allow many buildings to do it. “This is something that can benefit you. This is something that will benefit your energy bill and your health and livelihood.”

Extreme heat is becoming more common in the U.S. Here’s how to stay safe.

Extreme heat is a public health challenge as one of the deadliest effects of climate change, with an estimated 580 New Yorkers dying prematurely last year related to hot weather, according to the 2024 NYC Heat-Related Mortality Report. Last summer, the city saw over 20 days with temperatures over 90°F, a number that is projected to triple by the 2050s, according to the New York City Panel on Climate Change.

Last month, the city launched a dashboard to help New Yorkers and city officials assess heat risks and guide the local response to heat waves.

Heris says reflective roofs are a fast, easy, and cheap (or even free) way to cool buildings. Studies show that in non-air-conditioned residential buildings, the coated roofs can lower maximum indoor temperatures by 2.2 to 5.9°F.

How reflective coating mitigates urban heat island effect

A cool roof is able to lower building temperatures due to its ability to reflect sunlight. It can be installed by either painting on a reflective coating, installing a reflective membrane, or installing cool shingles. Cool shingles are made of either asphalt, wood or polymer, and work best on pitched roofs.

The NYC CoolRoofs program only offers to paint reflective coating on flat roofs. Coating dark roofs requires maintenance over time due to wear from weather. But installing a cool roof in the first place will help it last.

The reflective coating helps combat the urban heat island effect, where air temperature is hotter in cities than surrounding suburban and rural areas.

“The things that we have constructed our cities out of often absorb and retain and then re-radiate more heat … things like asphalt building roofs, or particularly, dark, tar-based building roofs,” said Travis Flohr, assistant professor of landscape architecture at Penn State and co-researcher with Heris of “Cool Roofs in a Warm City.”

With dark roofs, heat is absorbed by the building, said Mike Treglia, lead scientist for the New York Cities Program at The Nature Conservancy.

“One of the biggest issues of the urban heat island effect is that cities don’t really cool down as much at night as other areas,” Treglia said. “It’s not just the daytime heat stress that people face, but also not being able to cool down in their un-air-conditioned apartments at night.”

New York is getting hotter. A new state dashboard aims to anticipate health risks.

This is even more difficult for people with underlying conditions such as asthma, heart disease, and diabetes, according to the World Health Organization. People who have chronic health issues are more vulnerable to heat because they retain more body heat or due to medications they take.

The city has a program to help New Yorkers buy and install an air conditioner. But about 21%, or 493,000 rental households across the city, don’t run their AC because of the cost, a 2023 housing and vacancy survey found.

A cool roof can lower energy bills. According to the study by Heris and Flohr, installing a cool roof can cut cooling costs by 7%-15%. This also lowers carbon emissions and helps the city reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. Every 2,500 square feet of roof that is coated can reduce the city’s carbon footprint by 1 ton of CO2.

To reach this goal, the city passed Local Law 97 to lower greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, the source of two-thirds of the emissions in the city, according to NYC Buildings. Buildings originally were required to send in data on their emissions starting at the end of this month, but the department recently gave property owners more time to comply.

NYC program offers free roof coating for many buildings

The NYC CoolRoofs program, which is run in partnership with the city’s Department of Small Business Services, the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and The HOPE Program, has covered over 12 million square feet of roofs since 2009 with reflective coating.

The HOPE Program is hoping to partner with non-profit organizations around the five boroughs to get more buildings to install cool roofs – especially in neighborhoods that have a higher heat vulnerability, like the South Bronx and parts of Brooklyn. These boroughs are more vulnerable to the heat due to the lack of trees and other green space that provide shade.

Heris has worked with groups like South Bronx Unite and El Puente in his research. They are “important groups, because they are really connected to their community. If we can provide some knowledge for them that becomes good material, to go to the community and take these numbers and see just this is how it’s gonna happen.”

Thirty percent of flat, dark roofs across the city could have a cool roof installed, Heris said. For eligible buildings, the service is free. To qualify, roofs must be flat, in good condition, accessible to workers, and made of certain materials, like asphalt and bitumen.

The expense of needed repairs is a major barrier for keeping buildings out of the program, especially in disadvantaged areas, said Kendra Jones, director of HOPE’s Bronx programs.

“The repairs that we would need to be on the roof is a higher priority than the actual coating itself,” she said.

HOPE has mostly been working on residential buildings, but is planning more outreach to larger commercial buildings.

“The return is so good, you don’t really need to think about whether [you] should do it or not,” Heris said.

This story was produced in partnership with the Health & Science Reporting Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

New York City mayoral primary voters cast ballots in extreme heat

2025-06-24T21:23:39+00:00

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat’s free New York City newsletter here.

New York City’s highly anticipated mayoral primary election collided on Tuesday with the first heat wave of the summer.

In the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn, temperatures that climbed into the 90s hadn’t deterred Stephanie Ferdinand, 64, from casting her ballot. A supporter of Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor, Ferdinand said she wanted to see the next mayor defend the city against federal incursions, including cuts to public health insurance programs.

“We have to vote, no matter how hot it is,” she said.

An extreme heat warning was in effect for New York City through Tuesday evening, with dangerously hot conditions and heat index values expected to reach up to 106°F. The combination of extreme heat and humidity would significantly increase the risk of heat-related illnesses, the National Weather Service said. High temperatures were expected to continue through Wednesday.

A sign direct voters toward the polls in the New York City mayoral primary election in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn on Tuesday.

Elected officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, urged residents to take precautions while voting, including by limiting time outdoors, hydrating, and seeking out cool spaces.

As New York’s summers get hotter, extreme heat is an increasingly pressing public health threat. People 65 years old or older, those with asthma or heart disease, outdoor workers, and people without access to cool shelter are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat.

In New York City, an estimated 580 people, on average, die prematurely each summer due to hot weather, typically when heat aggravates underlying illness, according to city data. Visits to the emergency department for heat-related illnesses increased over the weekend and spiked early this week as temperatures climbed, according to city data.

Extreme heat is becoming more common in the U.S. Here’s how to stay safe.

In Flatbush, Emma Eriksson, 35, turned out in the hot weather to rank Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman and Queens Democrat, first on her ballot. She’d taken precautions against the heat, voting in the morning before the temperature spiked and planning to stay hydrated and replenish salts throughout the day.

“Heat sickness is real — it’s so brutal,” she said.

Emma Eriksson, 35, and Jack Drury, 40, beat the heat in Flatbush, Brooklyn to vote in New York City's mayoral primary election on Tuesday.

In East Flatbush, poll workers at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church cooled themselves with fans that read “Vote NYC.” The neighborhood is among those in New York City most vulnerable to heat mortality, as determined by the city’s heat vulnerability index. The index identifies areas where residents are at the highest risk of dying during and immediately following extreme heat, based on factors like daytime summer surface temperature, access to air conditioning, the availability of green space, and median income.

For Virginia Pierre, 79, the heat hadn’t stopped her from getting to the polls. Pierre had ranked Cuomo first and said she wanted to see more support for seniors and for New Yorkers who rely on food pantries.

“I didn’t want to come out, that’s the truth,” she said, leaning on her cane.

“But I want to vote,” she added. “We need help.”

With her civic duty fulfilled, Pierre said she planned to get her nails done for her granddaughter’s high school graduation — and then retreat into the air conditioning at home.

“I’m not coming out,” she said.

In another heat vulnerable area, the Arverne neighborhood of The Rockaways, in Queens, Carlene Hamilton, 70, left the polls feeling hopeful.

Hamilton said she wanted to see a change for the city, and had been energized by Mamdani’s youthful, progressive campaign. But she was concerned that the heat wave would deter voters, particularly those among her area’s elderly population.

While Hamilton has air conditioning at home, she said she doesn’t use it much. After voting, she planned to go to the boardwalk, to walk along the water.

“We’re fortunate to have a breeze out here,” she said.

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

Hot — and humid — summer days are on New York’s horizon. How to keep cool.

2025-06-20T13:31:00+00:00

We’ll dive into the warm temperatures on New York’s radar, but first …

Me at the WNYC studio.

Have you voted yet? Last week, I shared a health voter guide for the NYC mayoral election. This week, I sat down with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer to discuss it. You can listen to our conversation here.

Okay, back to our scheduled programming …

Last weekend, I joined 9,999 other women to run a loop through Central Park for the Women’s Mini 10K. It was empowering and energizing, but wow was I struggling with the heat. I assumed the temperature must be in the 90s. The reality? Just 75°F.

The problem wasn’t the heat alone, it was the humidity. When moisture in the air is high, your body can’t cool itself as effectively. Sweat just sits on your skin instead of evaporating, making it feel much hotter than it is.

Next week, parts of New York could see high temps reach 100°F — the hottest day of the year so far. Because our bodies gradually adapt to heat as the summer progresses, we’re especially vulnerable in June. Early-season heat hits harder. There’s also truth to the old saying: It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

Let’s break down why heat and humidity matter — and what you can do to stay safe.

⚠️[Increasing Heat and Humidity!]: For early next week, we are looking at our first stretch of prolonged hot, humid weather beginning Sunday and lasting through at least the middle of next week. Stay tuned for forecast updates as we get closer at https://t.co/wTqdsomHTB pic.twitter.com/F7gU29rkQZ
— NWS New York NY (@NWSNewYorkNY) June 17, 2025

Back up: Why humidity feels so brutal

When it’s hot outside and/or we’re exerting ourselves, the body tries to cool itself down by sweating. But it’s not sweat alone that cools you down. The sweat needs to evaporate off your skin. The evaporation of a teaspoon of sweat could cool your entire bloodstream by 2 degrees F.

This is where humidity comes in. When there’s a lot of moisture already in the air, sweat can’t evaporate as effectively because the air can’t absorb more moisture, making it harder to cool down. The body’s cooling processes become less effective, and heat and humidity can become dangerous. Older people are more vulnerable to humid conditions because the body produces less sweat as we age.

Humidity and dew point describe how muggy it feels, but they measure different things:

Relative humidity — the percentage in your weather app — tells us how full the air is with water vapor relative to its capacity. But warm air holds more water, meaning 60% humidity on a hot day feels much stickier than 60% on a cool day.
Dew point is more precise. It measures the actual amount of moisture in the air. Technically, it’s the temperature at which air becomes saturated and dew forms. The higher the dew point, the more moisture is in the air, and the muggier it feels.

In short: The dew point is a better indicator. A dew point above 65°F feels sticky. Above 70°F, it becomes more uncomfortable and risky during a heat wave.

When I was running my race last weekend, the humidity hovered around 80%, with a dew point of 70°F.

Heat-related illness in New York

Every year, thousands of people across New York visit the emergency department for heat-related illness. In 2024, there were 3,213 heat-related emergency department visits in New York state, excluding New York City. From May 1, 2025, through Thursday, there have been 556 ED visits for heat in New York state (excluding New York City).

Emergency department visits for heat-related illness in New York state, 2025. The heat index is a combination of temperature and humidity, and is similar to the “feels like” temperature.

Heat illness can be severe. In New York City last year, seven people died directly because of heat, and 570 died because heat exacerbated underlying conditions, like heart disease. Those age 60 and over are most susceptible to heat-related illness.

New York is getting hotter. A new state dashboard aims to anticipate health risks.

Counterintuitively, people in New York who died from heat stress were most often exposed to dangerous heat inside their homes, not outside. Without air conditioning, indoor temperatures can be much higher than outdoors, especially at night, and can continue for days after a heat wave.

New York families with low incomes can apply for free AC units or fans through the Home Energy Assistance Program. In 2024, more than 25,000 households in New York state got access to cooling units through HEAP.

What you can do

The best thing to do is to try to stay cool and check in on neighbors who may not have air conditioning.

Know your risks. The Centers for Disease Control and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dashboard tracks local heat risk scores that takes into account temperature, humidity, and other metrics that impact health. The risk score ranges daily from “No risk” to “Extreme” heat risk. Enter your ZIP code here.
Apply to get a free air conditioner or fan through HEAP, if you qualify. However, the future of HEAP’s program is uncertain. In April, all federal employees overseeing the national program that funds state-level HEAPs were laid off, and funds were frozen due to cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services. Applications will remain open only as long as state funds last — once they run out, no more households will receive cooling assistance.
Use a cooling space. Cooling centers can be found in New York City here and across the rest of the state here. Libraries, museums, or coffee shops are great options.
Keep your pets cool. They’re susceptible to heatstroke, too. Here are hot-weather safety tips for pets.
Watch out for hot playgrounds. Metal, turf, and black asphalt can cause burns on hot days.
Know what symptoms to look out for. Confusion, dizziness, and unconsciousness are serious signs of heatstroke that warrant calling 911.

Bottom line

It’s going to be a hot one. Stay hydrated, check on your neighbors, and don’t underestimate June heat — it can hit harder than we expect.

Love,

Your NY Epi

Extreme heat is becoming more common in the U.S. Here’s how to stay safe.

2025-06-12T11:00:00+00:00

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Summer brings heat waves — and the risk of heat-related illnesses.

Extreme heat is the primary cause of weather-related mortality in the United States, posing a significant threat to public health. Periods of unusually hot weather are especially dangerous for elderly people and those with chronic conditions. But anyone working or exercising outside, or those without access to cool shelters, can be vulnerable to health effects during heat waves.

And it’s only getting hotter. With climate change, extreme heat events are expected to become more frequent and intense. Globally, nearly half of the world’s population experienced at least 30 extra days of extreme heat between May 2024 and May 2025, a result of human-driven climate change, according to a new report from scientists at Climate Central, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and World Weather Attribution.

Here’s what to know about extreme heat and how to stay safe this summer.

What is extreme heat, and how deadly is it?

Extreme heat is generally considered to be a prolonged period of hot, and sometimes humid, weather that is unusual for a certain location and time of year.

But there is no standard nationwide definition of extreme heat across the United States, given the country’s highly varied climates, said Dr. Jaime Madrigano, an associate professor of American health in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“We have a big country, and it’s not uniform,” she said.

As a result, there are varying thresholds for heat advisories, as well as differences in how heat-related mortality is recorded, she said.

New York is getting hotter. A new state dashboard aims to anticipate health risks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 700 people die from extreme heat every year across the country. But the full scope of mortality is likely much higher, because heat-related deaths can occur even without temperatures reaching extreme levels. A JAMA study published last year recorded 2,325 heat-related deaths in the United States in 2023, the highest annual total — and a 117% increase — since 1999.

In New York City alone, an estimated 580 people, on average, die prematurely each summer due to hot weather, typically when heat aggravates underlying illness, according to city data. The city’s 2024 Heat-Related Mortality Report noted that heat-exacerbated deaths have increased over the past decade because of summers that are hotter overall, with more “non-extreme hot days” of temperatures between 82°F and the city’s extreme heat threshold of 95°F.

What are heat-related illnesses?

Extreme heat can have a wide range of effects on our bodies. Heat cramps — muscle cramps and spasms that occur after intense exercise and sweating in high heat — can be the first sign of heat-related illness. Heat exhaustion, which occurs when the body loses water and salt, is characterized by dizziness, thirst, heavy sweating, nausea, and weakness, and can lead to heatstroke.

The most common heat-related illnesses that Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, sees in the summer are respiratory or cardiac illnesses exacerbated by intense heat.

“It doesn’t need to be in the middle of a heat wave,” he said. “Someone with asthma or emphysema, in the setting of a day where the heat index is high, certainly is more at risk of having an exacerbation of their chronic illness.”

Heatstroke is more rare, but requires an emergency response, he said. That condition occurs when a person’s body temperature rises rapidly — to 106°F or higher within 10 to 15 minutes — and cannot cool down. Symptoms of heatstroke include confusion and slurred speech, loss of consciousness, hot skin, seizures, and very high body temperature. Heatstroke can lead to permanent disability or death.

The condition can occur in older people who can’t easily cool their bodies down, Tedeschi said, but also in younger people who exert themselves on hot days, like an athlete who collapses during preseason training. In those cases, ER teams will work to quickly cool people down, including by immersing them in ice water.

“When people have heatstroke, cooling them quickly is really the key to reducing their mortality,” he said.

Who is most vulnerable to extreme heat?

People who are particularly vulnerable to heat-related illness include those with asthma or heart disease, pregnant women, those 65 years or older, infants, young children, those working or exercising outside, and those who are unhoused, according to the CDC.

Socioeconomic status and access to green spaces can significantly shape one’s vulnerability to extreme heat, and some cities have made efforts to map out areas where those factors are particularly pronounced. New York City’s heat vulnerability index details which neighborhoods are most at risk for death during and after extreme heat, based on factors like daytime summer surface temperature, access to air conditioning, median income, and the availability of green space. Philadelphia offers a similar tool that identifies heat vulnerability on a block-by-block basis, as well as identifying local pools, libraries, parks, and health centers.

Summer heat is felt unevenly across metro Atlanta. Experts say more data is needed to address the public health threat.

Madrigano, the Johns Hopkins expert, is researching heat vulnerability in New Orleans. The city’s hot, humid weather and high poverty rate makes it particularly susceptible to heat-related morbidity and mortality, she said, pointing to factors like whether residents can afford to keep their air conditioning running.

“From a public health perspective, we know the most effective strategy for keeping people safe during extreme heat is air conditioning,” she said.

In some states, new tools aim to help residents and officials identify who is most at risk during heat waves. In California, the newly released CalHeatScore offers daily rankings of forecast heat impacts in ZIP codes across the state. New York state recently launched a similar tool, which combines weather forecasting with data on heat-related emergency department visits and emergency medical services calls.

How can I protect myself against extreme heat?

There are ways to mitigate health impacts during periods of hot weather.

“At the end of the day, it’s about protecting yourself from heat, taking frequent breaks, staying hydrated, staying in cool areas if you can, adjusting your work hours, if you can, to avoid those hottest parts of the day,” Tedeschi said.

When venturing outside, wear loose, lightweight, light-colored clothing and sunscreen, and try to stay in the shade if possible, the CDC advises. During periods of elevated temperatures, never leave children or pets in cars.

Other standard recommendations include staying in air-conditioned indoor locations. People who lack air conditioning at home are advised to seek out cool public spaces like libraries. The National Center for Healthy Housing offers a list of each state’s cooling center resources.

What does a warming climate mean for cities and hospitals?

Some states and cities have rolled out heat response and climate mitigation plans, ranging from heat and health forecasts to initiatives to paint reflective roofs and plant more trees. But a federal effort to develop heat mitigation strategies across the country was recently defunded by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, cities continue to heat up. In Atlanta, compared to 1970, there are now almost two more weeks of extreme heat per year. And New York City is projected to see the number of days each year with temperatures higher than 90 degrees rise from 17 to as many as 54 by the 2030s — and as many as 108 by the 2080s.

The warming climate also poses challenges for health systems. In a 2022 NEJM Catalyst article, researchers noted that New York City can expect the number of heat waves to increase from an average of two per year to seven per year by 2050, and urged hospital systems to create response plans.

Tedeschi, the New York City emergency room physician, worries about what increasingly long and intense heat waves will mean for the patients he cares for — and health systems. A heat wave can become a “mass casualty event” if multiple patients arrive with heatstroke, which requires a robust team response, he said.

“I expect we’ll see more patients in the ER with heat-exacerbated illness over the next few years,” he said.

What questions and concerns do you have about how rising temperatures affect health? Email us at nyc.tips@healthbeat.org.

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

New York is getting hotter. A new state dashboard aims to anticipate health risks.

2025-05-30T17:15:25+00:00

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As climate change drives up temperatures and the risk of heat-related illnesses in New York, public health leaders and researchers are paying more attention to heat surveillance.

This week, the New York State Department of Health launched a dashboard that aims to help New Yorkers assess heat exposure and health risks — and guide local responses to heat waves.

“This is a new tool that will help us understand the risk hot weather presents to us,” State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said in a statement. “We have moved beyond, ‘it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity’; it’s much more complicated than that, and this dashboard offers better insight into your risk.”

Since 1901, average temperatures in New York state have increased by almost 2.6°F, and since 2000, they’ve remained higher than in any period in recorded history, according to the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment. And it’s only going to get hotter from here: Average temperatures in the state are projected to rise between 5° and 11°F by the end of the century.

As rising temperatures increase the risk of heat-related illnesses, McDonald said that the dashboard will “help communities and decisionmakers — like school officials and employers – make informed choices, such as adjusting outdoor activities or opening cooling centers.”

What’s the link between extreme heat and public health?

Scientific research shows that as climate change makes summers hotter — and heat waves longer — the risk of heat-related illness rises. Extreme heat can be especially dangerous for children, elderly adults, people with chronic conditions, anyone who works outside, and those who are unhoused.

More than 700 people die from extreme heat every year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The most serious heat-related illness, heat stroke, occurs when a person’s body temperature rises rapidly and cannot cool down. Heat stroke can drive body temperature up to 106°F or higher within 10 to 15 minutes, and without emergency treatment can result in permanent disability or death, according to the CDC.

Symptoms of heat stroke include confusion and slurred speech, loss of consciousness, hot skin, seizures and very high body temperature. Signs of heat exhaustion — the body’s response to excessive loss of water and salt — include headache, nausea, dizziness, weakness, thirst, heavy sweating and elevated body temperature.

Extreme heat can also worsen the effects of air pollution and exacerbate respiratory conditions. A 2012 study of extreme heat and respiratory hospitalizations in New York state estimated that from 2080 to 2099, extreme heat could lead to two to six times the number of hospital admissions for respiratory conditions than had occurred from 1991 to 2004.

Research published last year in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that from May to September 2023, daily rates of emergency department visits due to heat-related illnesses peaked in a number of regions during warm-weather months and remained elevated for an extended period afterward.

“Heat-related illness will continue to be a significant public health concern as climate change results in longer, hotter, and more frequent episodes of extreme heat,” the study’s authors noted. “By monitoring heat-related health impacts, public health agencies can detect trends in health care utilization rates, identify subpopulations at increased risk, and guide public health actions tailored to specific heat exposure levels.”

How does the dashboard work?

The New York State Heat Risk and Illness Dashboard uses weather data from the National Weather Service and the state’s own early warning weather detection system. It also publishes recent data on heat-related emergency department visits and emergency medical services calls, drawn from statewide syndromic surveillance system reports. The dashboard grew out of HeatRisk, a NWS tool that launched nationwide last spring and combines weekly weather forecasts with predictions for the risk of heat-related health impacts.

New York’s dashboard shows a county-by-county map colored to show heat risk, ranging from “little to no” risk of heat-related illnesses to “extreme” risk. Each risk category offers corresponding recommendations for the public. At the level of “minor” risk, people who are extremely sensitive to heat, like older adults with underlying health conditions, are urged to take breaks and drink fluids; at “moderate” risk, those sensitive to heat and healthy individuals working or playing outdoors should take more frequent breaks and drink plenty of fluids; at “major” risk, everyone should take breaks and drink fluids, and those sensitive to heat should adjust activities; and at “extreme” risk, conditions are dangerous for everyone, meaning that activities should be adjusted, health symptoms monitored, and more time spent in air conditioning.

As of Friday, every county in the state was deemed to be at “little to no” risk of heat-related illnesses, with only Richmond County (Staten Island), deemed at “minor” risk. But by Wednesday, the forecast showed, all of the state could fall under a “minor” risk category, with some counties in Western New York under a “moderate” risk for heat-related illnesses.

How can this tool help us understand heat risk?

State health officials and researchers hope that the dashboard will help inform New Yorkers of their health risks during periods of elevated temperatures and guide local responses to heat waves.

While there is annual variation in weather, longer-term climate trends suggest that New York is getting warmer, said Dr. Neil A. Muscatiello, director of the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology at the Health Department’s Center for Environmental Health.

“In terms of long-term trends, we expect to see more days forecasted in the red and magenta categories — the major and extreme risk categories,” he said.

The launch of the state’s dashboard coincided with the publication of a study in the CDC’s MMWR, which assessed the value of HeatRisk forecasts for New York state.

The study, led by Muscatiello and other Health Department staffers, tracked HeatRisk forecasts for 57 New York counties — excluding those in New York City — from May to September 2024. Researchers found that for New York state and for six of seven state regions, a higher risk forecast was associated with higher rates of heat-related illnesses.

Muscatiello, the study’s lead author, said the findings helped establish that when the HeatRisk forecast suggested higher heat risks, that was reflected in actual emergency department data the next day.

“The forecast could provide a basis for developing heat emergency plans at the local levels,” he said.

What about heat surveillance for New York City?

The state’s new dashboard focuses on counties outside of New York City for health-related data, because when it comes to heat-related illnesses, New York City has its own databases to rely on.

The city tracks real-time heat-related illnesses using syndromic surveillance reports from hospitals in the city, and publishes data on temperatures and ED visits for heat-related illnesses. The city also maintains a “heat vulnerability index,” which shows neighborhoods where residents have heightened risk of dying during and immediately following extreme heat, based on factors like daytime summer surface temperature, access to air conditioning, the availability of green space, and residents’ median income.

The city is particularly vulnerable to the health effects of extreme heat because of the urban heat island effect, which describes how a city’s buildings, roads and infrastructure drive up its overall temperature. Even within New York City, there can be micro heat islands, where temperatures are even higher in neighborhoods with histories of disinvestment and less green space, experts told Healthbeat last year.

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

Summer heat is felt unevenly across metro Atlanta. Experts say more data is needed to address the public health threat.

2025-05-14T20:53:19+00:00

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There’s no question that the coming summer in Atlanta will be a scorcher. But exactly how hot it will get can vary greatly in pockets across the metro area, creating uneven health risks.

Experts don’t have the data from the many places where people live, work, and play outdoors to track those extreme temperatures. Atlanta has only one “class 1” weather station that can provide high-quality data over a long historical period, and it’s at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, though there are more weather stations across the metro region.

“The heat risk in one neighborhood is actually dramatically different than the heat risk in another neighborhood, and we have almost no information on that,” said Brian Stone, a professor who runs the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech.

The lack of temperature data across the metro area makes it difficult for leaders to address the decades of rising temperatures, which pose a public health threat.

“Atlanta now experiences nearly two weeks worth of extreme heat days per year than it did in 1970 — part of a broader trend in which nearly every U.S. city is heating up,” said Dr. Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at nonprofit Climate Central.

A 2021 study found that Atlanta had 19 heat-related deaths each year attributable to human-induced climate change between 1991 and 2006.

Air temperature and humidity combine to affect health

Stone said there are many sources of heat data, but each has limitations.

Satellites capture surface temperature – how a street would feel if you touch it – but not the combination of temperature and humidity that drive health impacts from heat.

The Atlanta metro area should develop a more robust monitoring system, he said.

He pointed to Philadelphia, which developed a map that shows detailed heat risk by census tract, as well as where people can access cooling stations and other services to help with heat.

Stone’s lab uses climate models to help cities understand which neighborhoods have higher temperatures and how measures like adding trees or cool roofing to buildings could lower those temperatures.

One study Stone conducted for the City of Atlanta in 2023 found different neighborhoods face wide differences in heat risks. Areas with higher density had higher summer temperatures, while those with more tree canopy had lower temperatures.

While the English Avenue neighborhood had a heat vulnerability score of 10 — the highest in the city — nearby Georgia Tech had a score of 4. Neighborhoods to the west and south of the city center showed the highest total levels of heat vulnerability, on average.

That study also found that the prevalence of central air conditioning across the city was 96% but as low as 80% in some westside neighborhoods.

An Atlanta-based project called GEM, for Greenlink Equity Map, created by nonprofit Greenlink Analytics, measures urban heat using a nighttime temperature and converts it into a heat index for different neighborhoods in many cities.

The map presents data about the entire metro region and can show data about health and climate-related variables like utility burden – how much of a person’s income goes to energy costs – and tree canopy in different neighborhoods, said Matt Cox, CEO and executive director of Greenlink.

Some neighborhoods in Atlanta have a lot of tree canopy but still experience a high energy burden, which means people may not be able to afford air conditioning or must make choices between food and medicine or utilities.

It’s important to record nighttime temperatures that reflect accumulated heat over the day, but many models use morning or daytime measures, which tend to be lower. The Greenlink map uses nighttime temperature measures from satellites coupled with machine learning to produce its data.

The City of Atlanta is updating its climate resilience plan, which will include recommendations to address extreme heat, spokesperson Rayna Plummer said.

The city is planning several community engagement events related to climate resilience this summer.

Citizen scientists help collect temperature data

In Gwinnett County one day last August, 20 volunteers drove around a 27-square-mile area with thermometers to track the temperature at different times of day, part of a federal effort to enlist local volunteers to track urban heat since 2017.

Citizen science projects like the one-day temperature mapping effort help people learn more about heat and get them involved, Stone said. But the data’s single-day focus is limited.

Still, the project helped show where “urban heat islands” are and which areas lack tree canopy, said state Rep. Marvin Lim, who helped lead the effort.

Lim said his greatest insight from the data was that “unless there were significant trees between heavy-use roads/industrial areas and residential areas … adjacent residential areas were still going to be very hot.”

“It made me think of how difficult it is for trees to exist in these kind of urban landscapes - the impervious surfaces are going to reduce their cooling effect, which means, in my mind, you really need a significant number of trees in these areas,” Lim said.

In concrete terms, the data helped influence a decision to apply for a grant from the American Academy of Dermatology to build a shaded bus shelter along Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Gwinnett. That was driven by the heat mapping project and determining where people walked a lot.

The location at Nett Church was chosen “because it gets hot there (little tree cover, industrial area), but people are frequently walking in that area.”

DeKalb County is working on a tree canopy study that will establish a baseline map and track changes over time in unincorporated areas, according to its website.

In Cobb County, a class of Georgia Tech students working with Professor Jairo Garcia mapped heat islands in 2022. They also provided recommendations, suggesting the county develop a climate resiliency plan.

The county is working on it, Chief Sustainability Officer Kimberly White told Healthbeat, though it’s in early stages.

Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.

Federal cuts shrink heating and AC aid program, leaving New Yorkers in the cold

2025-04-16T19:07:28+00:00

This story was originally published by THE CITY. Sign up to get the latest New York City news delivered to you each morning. Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat’s free New York City newsletter here.

Mike Knerr was excited to move into his Washington Heights apartment in September 2023, but coming off a hot summer, he faced a looming problem: His building didn’t have central air conditioning, and he didn’t have an AC unit — or the money to buy one.

Knerr, who is HIV-positive, was out of work as his health took a nosedive. But the 42-year-old receives benefits through the the city’s HIV/AIDS Services Administration, which is how he found out he might be eligible to receive a free air conditioner from the federally funded Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps New Yorkers pay their heating bills in the winter and provides air conditioning units in the summer.

Knerr applied last April, and became one of the more than 10,000 households in New York City authorized to receive the cooling benefit. With his AC unit installed before summer, he felt relief.

“It would have taken all my expenses for the entire month to try to buy even a small air conditioner that wouldn’t have been able to cool the apartment very well,” said Knerr. “The medications and things cause me to sweat a lot, so it’s helpful for me to stay healthy.”

Applications for this season’s HEAP’s cooling assistance opened Tuesday. But the future of the program is uncertain: The Trump administration in early April fired all the federal staff that ran the program as part of wider layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services. And states are millions of dollars short in promised federal funding, having still not received about 10% of the $4.1 billion Congress approved. That means New York has yet to receive about $36 million of its expected $360.2 million for HEAP, which helps over 1.5 million households across the state each year.

With the heat of summer approaching and utility bills mounting, consumer advocates and government officials are sounding the alarm.

“This is a devastating decision that puts millions of households across the country at risk,” said Laurie Wheelock, executive director of the Public Utility Law Project. “Any disruption in the administration of HEAP could have serious consequences for the million-plus eligible New Yorkers already struggling to keep up with rising utility bills.”

$1 billion in unpaid energy bills

About one-quarter of low-income households in New York City spend more than 20% of their income on energy bills, a 2024 report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found. On top of that, more than half a million Con Ed and National Grid customers downstate are at least 60 days behind on their energy bills, owing over $1 billion.

“We are counting on our federal elected officials to ensure this successful program continues to be funded and that New Yorkers are able to access the help they need,” a spokesperson for the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which administers the program in New York, said in a statement.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson previously said the agency “will continue to comply” with federal law and will be “better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent” because of the “reorganization.”

The less money the HEAP has, the sooner it will close off applications — shutting out eligible families from receiving help they need.

Last summer, New York’s HEAP funds for cooling assistance ran out in July. Without the federal funding — or short of an emergency infusion of funds from the state — the program could close even sooner this year and help much fewer families. In January, when winter HEAP closed to applications, Gov. Kathy Hochul allocated $35 million to reopen the program, which previously cut off applications in March.

Emma Wallner, a spokesperson for Hochul, declined to comment on whether the governor might once again support HEAP with more state funds, but in a statement blamed Republicans for cuts to the social safety net.

“The governor will continue fighting for state tax cuts, credits, and rebates that put money back in the pockets of New Yorkers, but ultimately there’s only one feasible solution: New York’s GOP members of Congress need to stand up, fight back, and reverse these cuts,” Wallner said.

In the meantime, the state is accepting applications to get a window air conditioning unit worth up to $800. Access to cooling, particularly through HEAP, has been a way to mitigate heat’s danger, said Annie Carforo, climate justice campaigns manager at the West Harlem-based nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

“This lifeline is critical,” she said. “We need to make sure that everybody’s equipped with the equipment in their homes that’s going to keep them safe.”

Heat waves deadline in New York City

Exposure to extreme heat is a top threat to the lives of New Yorkers. The city sees an average of 580 heat-related deaths each year. Heat can worsen underlying health conditions, like cardiovascular disease.

And while ensuring access to in-home cooling is essential, the program could go further, according to advocates like Carforo and city health department officials. That’s because HEAP’s cooling benefit does not cover the cost of utility bills — and the expense can prevent people from using ACs.

“We want to see the program expanded to include utility costs,” said Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Assistant Commissioner Carolyn Olson at a City Council hearing last week. “You can have that air conditioner, but if you can’t turn it on, it’s not helping you.”

She cited a health department report showing that among the New Yorkers who died from heat stress in their homes, 90% either lacked AC or the AC they had wasn’t working or in use.

Olson acknowledged the “federal changes” and emphasized the need to advocate for more HEAP funding in general.

In testimony to Congress last week, National Energy Assistance Directors Association Executive Director Mark Wolfe asked lawmakers to fund HEAP at at least the same levels in the upcoming fiscal year, describing the $4.1 billion figure as “the minimum amount” HEAP needs to “provide basic support for the families it serves.”

New York State approved over $278.6 million of HEAP benefits to residents, including $50 million worth to those in the five boroughs, as of the end of January, according to OTDA data.

Wolfe on Tuesday sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services urging the feds to release the HEAP funding in limbo to states and to rehire its staff by May 1.

Samantha Maldonado is a senior reporter for THE CITY, where she covers climate, resiliency, housing and development. Email Samantha at smaldonado@thecity.nyc.

Climate change threatens mental well-being of youths. Here’s how to help them cope.

2025-01-09T14:46:55+00:00

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We’ve all read the stories and seen the images: The life-threatening heat waves. The wildfires of unprecedented ferocity. The record-breaking storms washing away entire neighborhoods. The melting glaciers, the rising sea levels, the coastal flooding.

As California wildfires stretch into the colder months, and hurricane survivors sort through the ruins left by floodwaters, let’s talk about an underreported victim of climate change: the emotional well-being of young people.

A nascent but growing body of research shows that a large proportion of adolescents and young adults, in the United States and abroad, feel anxious and worried about the impact of an unstable climate in their lives today and in the future.

Abby Rafeek, 14, is disquieted by the ravages of climate change, both near her home and far away. “It’s definitely affecting my life, because it’s causing stress thinking about the future and how, if we’re not addressing the problem now as a society, our planet is going to get worse,” says Abby, a high school student who lives in Gardena, California, a city of 58,000 about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

She says wildfires are a particular worry for her. “That’s closer to where I live, so it’s a bigger problem for me personally, and it also causes a lot of damage to the surrounding areas,” she says. “And also, the air gets messed up.”

Climate change is a serious concern for young people

In April, Abby took a survey on climate change for kids ages 12-17 during a visit to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

Rammy Assaf, a pediatric emergency physician at the hospital, adapted the survey from one developed five years ago for adults. He administered his version last year to over 800 kids ages 12-17 and their caregivers. He says initial results show climate change is a serious cause of concern for the emotional security and well-being of young people.

Assaf has followed up with the kids to ask more open-ended questions, including whether they believe climate change will be solved in their lifetimes; how they feel when they read about extreme climate events; what they think about the future of the planet; and with whom they are able to discuss their concerns.

“When asked about their outlook for the future, the first words they will use are helpless, powerless, hopeless,” Assaf says. “These are very strong emotions.”

Assaf says he would like to see questions about climate change included in mental health screenings at pediatricians’ offices and in other settings where children get medical care. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that counseling on climate change be incorporated into the clinical practice of pediatricians and into medical school curriculums, but not with specific regard to mental health screening.

Assaf says anxiety about climate change intersects with the broader mental health crisis among youth, which has been marked by a rise in depression, loneliness, and suicide over the past decade, though there are recent signs it may be improving slightly.

A 2022 Harris Poll of 1,500 U.S. teenagers found that 89% of them regularly think about the environment, “with the majority feeling more worried than hopeful.” In addition, 69% said they feared they and their families would be affected by climate change in the near future. And 82% said they expected to have to make key life decisions — including where to live and whether to have children — based on the state of the environment.

And the impact is clearly not limited to the United States. A 2021 survey of 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds across 10 countries found “59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried” about climate change.

Susan Clayton, chair of the psychology department at the College of Wooster in Ohio, says climate change anxiety may be more pronounced among younger people than adults. “Older adults didn’t grow up being as aware of climate change or thinking about it very much, so there’s still a barrier to get over to accept it’s a real thing,” says Clayton, who co-created the adult climate change survey that Assaf adapted for younger people.

By contrast, “adolescents grew up with it as a real thing,” Clayton says. “Knowing you have the bulk of your life ahead of you gives you a very different view of what your life will be like.” She adds that younger people in particular feel betrayed by their government, which they don’t think is taking the problem seriously enough, and “this feeling of betrayal is associated with greater anxiety about the climate.”

Abby believes climate change is not being addressed with sufficient resolve. “I think if we figure out how to live on Mars and explore the deep sea, we could definitely figure out how to live here in a healthy environment,” she says.

How to ease kids’ anxiety about environment

If you are a parent whose children show signs of climate anxiety, you can help.

Louise Chawla, professor emerita in the environmental design program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says the most important thing is to listen in an open-ended way. “Let there be space for kids to express their emotions. Just listen to them and let them know it’s safe to express these emotions,” says Chawla, who co-founded the nonprofit Growing Up Boulder, which works with the city’s schools to encourage kids to engage civically, including to help shape their local environment.

Chawla and others recommend family activities that reinforce a commitment to the environment. They can be as simple as walking or biking and participating in cleanup or recycling efforts. Also, encourage your children to join activities and advocacy efforts sponsored by environmental, civic, or religious organizations.

Working with others can help alleviate stress and feelings of powerlessness by reassuring kids they are not alone and that they can be proactive.

Worries about climate change should be seen as a learning opportunity that might even lead some kids to their life’s path, says Vickie Mays, professor of psychology and health policy at UCLA, who teaches a class on climate change and mental health — one of eight similar courses offered recently at UC campuses.

“We should get out of this habit of ‘everything’s a mental health problem,’” Mays says, “and understand that often a challenge, a stress, a worry can be turned into advocacy, activism, or a reach for new knowledge to change the situation.”

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. KFF Health News is Healthbeat’s national reporting partner.

Report on Georgia Latinos: Legal status and language among barriers to health

2024-11-20T01:19:25+00:00

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Latinos, who make up at least 11% of the state’s population, face serious barriers to health care, especially mental health services, according to the State of the Latino Community in Georgia report released Tuesday.

“Immigration is a social determinant of health,” according to the report, which cited immigration status, transportation, and language among the challenges in gaining access to care.

In 2022, 58% of the about 1 million Latinos in Georgia were born in the United States, and that share is increasing.

Community leaders discussed the report at the 10th annual Latino Summit in Norcross. The report was sponsored by a group of community organizations led by the Latino Community Foundation of Georgia and Ser Familia, a nonprofit organization that provides social services.

The report combines quantitative data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Georgia Department of Public Health with individual stories and insights from Latinos in the state. Data in the report is limited with a lack of statistics disaggregated by race and the difficulty of counting undocumented immigrants.

The report covers a host of issues, from economic development to the arts. Here are five takeaways related to public health.

1. Immigration fears affect access to health system

About 350,000 of Georgia’s 1 million Latinos are undocumented immigrants, according to the report, but concerns about immigration status and deportation are widespread, said Belisa Urbina, CEO of Ser Familia.

Latinos often live in “mixed status” families or are otherwise fearful of being tracked. That prevents them from applying for government services, said Nikolai Elneser, the community impact officer at nonprofit Neighborhood Nexus.

Close to 15% of Latino children lack health insurance, more than double the 7% of Georgia children across all groups.

At Tuesday’s summit, Gilda Pedraza, executive director of the Latino Community Fund of Georgia, called on the state government to expand Medicaid to include all people, even if they are undocumented.

Not having a driver’s license makes it harder for some to get to and from doctor’s appointments in Atlanta, which has limited public transit.

2. Mental health system lacks Spanish-speaking providers

Intentional self-harm is the seventh leading cause of death among Latinos in Georgia. Latinos are the only group for which self-harm is in the top 10 causes of death, according to the report.

“We see about 1,500 minors a year in services, group and individual therapy, and two-thirds of them present [with] suicidal ideation. … This is very alarming,” Urbina said at the summit.

Some Latinos are reluctant to turn to psychiatric medications for cultural reasons, according to the report, but may trust a provider who takes the time to thoroughly discuss medication.

Parents are especially eager to get services for their children, but have trouble finding Spanish-speaking providers and getting appointments when they are not working, Elneser said.

“We have a tremendous disparity between the people that need the services and the available services that are linguistically relevant,” Urbina said.

Georgia’s certification requirements for foreign health professionals, including mental health workers, are too cumbersome, she said.

She estimates there are 100 fully licensed mental health providers who speak Spanish in the state and maybe only one Spanish-speaking psychiatrist. Her organization will soon hire a Spanish-speaking psychiatric nurse practitioner.

While many Latinos are proficient in English, people want to access services in their own languages, Urbina said. It’s especially important when discussing traumatic or sensitive topics.

Children face particular stresses, including the need to serve as interpreters for their family while dealing with weighty issues. And Latinos in general feel a great deal of anxiety about immigration, leaders said during Tuesday’s summit.

3. Latinas getting inadequate maternal health care

Pregnant Latinas get adequate maternal care at lower rates than the general population in Georgia.

About 22% of the state’s live births are born to Latina mothers who had inadequate prenatal care, higher than the 16% rate for non-Latina mothers.

The inability to get insurance and pay for services is one major barrier, said Roxana Chicas, a professor of nursing at Emory University. They also may have difficulty taking time off work to get care during the day and not be able to get rides to clinics.

“We know that more and more Latinos are moving out into Gwinnett, Cobb and further out, and [there’s] no transportation,” Chicas said.

Women who need to change their diets – because of gestational diabetes, for example – may not get culturally competent guidance about what to eat, Elneser said.

“The healthcare system is lacking cultural competency, and sometimes it’s not a warm environment for some women,” Chicas said.

4. Heat is a public health issue

The report calls on the governments and businesses to expand protections for workers exposed to heat.

Latinos are over-represented in hazardous occupations like construction, hospitality, and farmwork, according to the report, and heat is a particular problem.

Farmworkers are far more likely to die from heatstroke than other types of workers, according to one study cited in the report. The report notes that most H-2A (temporary agricultural visa) workers in Georgia are Latino.

“Many of these workers are workers of color … that don’t have the option of not working outdoors,” said Chicas, who specializes in studying the impact of heat on worker health.

“We have a responsibility to protect these workers while they’re building our homes, while they are harvesting our foods, so that they don’t die on the job from heat stroke, which is preventable,” she said.

It’s hard to know exactly how many people have died due to heat in Georgia because no surveillance system exists, although national numbers can help indicate local trends, Chicas said. It’s hard to identify when heat causes a death. She gave the example of someone who falls due to heat stroke – that death would be counted as death due to a fall and not heat.

Protecting workers from heat is not only the right thing to do, it’s also good business, the report said.

“Safe working conditions (including heat protections) benefit both workers (less injuries and illness) and employers (less absenteeism, lower turnover rates, and disruptions of operations),” the report said.

Six states have enacted worker heat protections, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Pedraza called on U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff to support legislation providing federal heat protections.

5. Trust is key to Latino public health

Leaders emphasized that trusted health workers are key to helping Latino Georgians access health services.

While more Spanish-speaking providers are needed, that’s not the only solution. Urbina would like to see more funding for community health workers.

Her organization has one who works within the Wellstar Health System to help people access and navigate services.

Ser Familia provides group therapy, and there are other evidence-backed, culturally competent programs that social service groups can provide that require a trained, but not necessarily professionally certified, health worker.

“There’s fear of being tracked as a mixed-status family,” Elneser said. “Latino communities have a very strong preference to engage with community organizations,” rather than governmental social services.

The personal touch is key for a community skittish about accessing help, said Dianne Román. As the coordinator of the Latino Community Fund’s Ventanillas de Salud program, she helps Latinos find free, Spanish-language services.

Román makes it clear that the events she organizes are “a safe space” to try to lessen people’s concerns about being deported over their immigration status.

And she serves as a constant point of contact for people in need of help.

“It [is] something more personal, and that’s how I like to work with the community: They know who is providing the services. They can trust you,” Román said.

This story has been updated to correct Roxana Chica’s first name.

Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.

Proposed federal heat rule might have saved these workers’ lives

2024-10-29T14:34:47+00:00

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On a sweltering afternoon in July 2020, Belinda Ramones got a call that her brother was in the hospital. The call was from a woman at the Florida landscaping business that he had joined that week, the Davey Tree Expert Co., Ramones said. By the time she arrived, she said, “My brother was swollen up from hands to toes.”

Two days later, her brother, Jose Leandro-Barrera, died at age 45 with acute kidney failure caused by heatstroke, according to a report from the Hillsborough County medical examiner. His temperature in the ambulance had been 108 degrees Fahrenheit, the report said.

It described the circumstances preceding his death, as recorded by a nurse. At the job site, Leandro-Barrera had advised his supervisor that he was not feeling well, and the supervisor told him to sit in a vehicle until he felt better. While there, he “urinated himself, had seizure like activity” and became unresponsive.

“Employee suffers from heat exhaustion while doing landscaping,” said an investigation into the incident from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agency issued a $9,639 fine to the Davey Tree Expert Co. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Without national regulations on preventing heat-related illness and death, OSHA has difficulty, in general, protecting workers before it’s too late, said Paloma Rentería, a Department of Labor spokesperson.

Laborers have suffered as summers have grown progressively hotter with climate change. But health policy and occupational health researchers say that worker deaths are not inevitable. Employers can save lives by providing ample water and breaks and building in time for new workers to adjust to extreme heat.

This is the logic behind proposed national rules that President Joe Biden set in motion in 2021, aiming to protect an estimated 36 million workers exposed to extreme heat. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 480 worker deaths from heat exposure each year, on average. But these are “vast underestimates,” according to OSHA, because heat stress is an underlying factor often unaccounted for in medical records.

The advocacy organization Public Citizen estimates that as many as 2,000 U.S. workers die of heat annually, based on extrapolations from heat injury data.

Both estimates are upsetting, said Linda McCauley, dean of the nursing school at Emory University and an occupational health researcher. “No one should go to work expecting that they might die,” she said.

Proposed heat rules may depend on election

The proposed rules — a heat standard from OSHA — reaches a milestone Dec. 30, when the public comment period closes. But it’s unlikely to be finalized before Biden leaves office.

Vice President Kamala Harris would likely carry the heat rules forward if she wins the presidency next month, said Jordan Barab, who was OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary during the Obama administration. She advanced heat regulations in California in 2020.

Should Donald Trump win, the rules would stall, Barab predicts. In general, Republicans have opposed workplace safety regulations over the past 20 years, saying they are costly to businesses and consumers. And during the first Trump administration, the number of OSHA inspectors tasked with monitoring workplace safety hit an all-time low across the agency’s 48-year history. Workplace inspections regarding heat stress dropped by half on Trump’s watch, according to an analysis by the National Employment Law Project.

OSHA’s rules would require employers to provide ample, cool drinking water, and shade or air conditioning for breaks, when temperatures exceed 80 degrees. Above 90 degrees, employers would need to provide paid 15-minute breaks every two hours.

Two additional aspects of the standard confront overlooked problems that contribute to heat deaths at work. More than 70% of workers who die of heat do so within their first week on the job. And delayed medical care is a common theme.

“We need to stop telling people who complain of being about to pass out to go sit in the car or take a break,” McCauley said. “Rest breaks are needed to prevent the problem, but once someone has symptoms, they need help fast.”

The proposed rules require employers to allow new workers time to acclimate to high temperatures and to institute protocols, like a buddy system, so that workers get rapid medical care as soon as they show signs of heat illness, like dizziness, confusion, and cramps.

Agricultural workers, like this person harvesting ferns in Pierson, Florida, would be protected from heat illness and death by a set of proposed heat regulations.

By the time an emergency medical team arrived to help one laborer in July 2021, he had stopped breathing, according to one Department of Labor press release. A supervisor at the ecological restoration company EarthBalance had seen him earlier that day, it said, and he was “sweating heavily, his hands were trembling, and he seemed confused.” He rested. “Only 30 minutes later, the supervisor returned to the man finding him unresponsive.”

That evening, Gilberto Macario-Gimenez died at the hospital, said a medical examiner case report. It noted “the decedent had overheated” and attributed his death to heart disease and hypertension. Heat can exacerbate those conditions.

OSHA investigated the situation. It fined EarthBalance $9,216, finding that “the employer failed to ensure that a person adequately trained to provide first aid to employees [was] working in an area where there was no infirmary.”

EarthBalance did not respond to requests for comment.

OSHA has received at least 12,980 comments on its proposals posted to the federal register. One woman wrote about her cousin who died while clearing shrubs for a rancher in Texas when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees: “He was only 34. There was no water or rest breaks.”

Republicans, industry groups oppose the standards

After the comment period ends in December, OSHA will hold a public hearing, incorporate changes, and finalize the rule. If Harris is president, Barab said, the agency may finish the process by 2026. For the rule to work, Congress would need to fund OSHA adequately, so that it can hire staffers to teach employers how to implement the standards, and enough investigators to enforce them.

Several industry groups have opposed the standard or requested changes. A single temperature threshold isn’t fair when climates and jobs vary widely, in addition to workers’ abilities to tolerate heat, wrote the Associated General Contractors of America in an online statement this year.

Some Republican lawmakers have called the rule government overreach. Rick Roth, a Republican Florida state representative, told Al Jazeera that workers are pushing for paid breaks because they “don’t want to work so hard.” If they didn’t feel safe, they could change jobs. “Go work for somebody else,” he said.

Critics also say that the regulations will cost employers. But a UCLA analysis of workers’ compensation claims in California suggests that a national heat standard saves money overall. The study estimated the cost of heat-related injuries between $750 million and $1.25 billion a year in California alone, including medical bills, lost wages, and disability claims.

A controversial set of national heat regulations would require employers to provide laborers cold water and paid rest breaks when temperatures exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because six states have varying sets of rules to reduce heat-related illness — California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — researchers and union representatives have been able to see where policies need strengthening. One issue with enforcement is that OSHA largely relies on employees to report hazards. One study found that just 14% of nearly 600 farmworkers surveyed in California knew about acclimatization and how much water they needed when temperatures were high.

Although Florida doesn’t have specific heat regulations, Dominique O’Connor of the Farmworker Association of Florida said the biggest obstacle in ensuring occupational safety is that workers are afraid of getting fired for filing a complaint with OSHA.

This is especially true for farmworkers with H-2A visas, which permit noncitizens to fill temporary jobs. Because these workers depend on their employers not only to remain in the country but often for transportation and housing, retaliation from employers would be life-altering. “This summer we talked with H-2A workers who were only given dirty water on the job,” she said. “They were told to just pretend it was coffee.”

Leaders in several Republican-led states are likely to push back against the federal standard if it’s issued. Last April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation that blocks local governments from requiring employers to offer workers water and shade when temperatures rise.

And the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the “Chevron doctrine” this year may embolden employers to challenge OSHA’s ability to enforce the rules. For decades, the Chevron doctrine had required courts to defer to expertise at regulatory agencies when interpreting regulations, but the high court’s ruling ended that. “We are in uncharted territory,” Barab said.

Correction: This article was updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on Oct. 29, 2024, to correctly reflect the Associated General Contractors of America’s current position on OSHA’s proposed heat standard. The article originally quoted a 2019 statement from the organization that called national heat regulations “unnecessary, unworkable, and impractical.” The group is no longer opposed to the idea but would like to see changes to the proposed rules.

Amy Maxmen is Healthbeat’s national reporter through a partnership with KFF Health News. Jeremy Young, senior producer at Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English, contributed to this report.

Health Secretary Becerra touts extreme heat protections. Farmworkers want more.

2024-09-05T19:59:33+00:00

On a sunny August morning in this agricultural town, before temperatures soared to 103 degrees, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra stood outside the small public library.

He came to talk about the Biden administration’s efforts to protect farmworkers from extreme heat and wildfire smoke, two emerging public health issues at the forefront of the climate crisis.

“There are still not enough protections for workers that are picking the food that we eat,” Becerra told a group of local reporters and government officials, who outnumbered the farmworkers in the audience.

Becerra, whose father worked in the fields, had just come from visiting women picking grapes who protect themselves from the sun by dressing in sweaters, long pants, and kerchiefs that cover their noses and mouths. The summers are long and intense in Clarksburg, a town of about 300 people along the Sacramento River that supplies California’s wine industry with petite sirah, sauvignon blanc, and other grapes harvested by hundreds of farmhands.

“It’s going to be a hot day,” he added. “But they are still dressed as if it were winter.”

The nation’s top health officer, who is mulling a run for governor, has emerged as one of the Biden administration’s leading voices on climate change, focusing attention on low-income and other marginalized workers, who feel the impacts of extreme weather the most. In March, HHS released voluntary safety guidelines and educational materials that farms can use to protect their workers from smoke and heat.

NYC looks to trees, reflective roofs to curb health threat

Becerra’s appearance before reporters in front of the library was brief and scheduled to mark Farmworker Appreciation Day, not far from his home in Sacramento, where his wife, a doctor specializing in high-risk pregnancies, remains at work. He advertised the educational materials on the risks of heat illness and when temperatures might be too high to work. But he acknowledged that there is only so much he can do because workplace protections are overseen by the Department of Labor.

“Much of our jurisdiction doesn’t reach those workers directly,” Becerra acknowledged after meeting with grape pickers. “We owe everyone who is working to put food on our table the best effort to make sure that they are working under the safest conditions.”

His aides distributed a press release that listed a number of resources, including free workplace health investigations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; a training on the dangers of heat and smoke from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Worker Training Program; and planned awards to 77 health care providers in high-need areas, totaling $50 million, from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Deaths due to extreme heat have jumped

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat, which is already the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States, as well as fueling wildfires across the nation. There’s no official count of farmworker deaths from weather, but heat-related deaths have increased in recent years, jumping from 1,722 in 2022 to about 2,300 last year.

The U.S. Department of Labor in July released a proposed workplace heat standard that would require employers to give rest breaks, water, and shade or air conditioning to workers exposed to excessive heat, but a final rule is likely years away. It’s unclear if it would supersede state regulations.

Outreach worker Virginia Moscoso said some farms haven’t allowed her to come onto their property to educate workers about how to prevent heat illness. (Vanessa G. Sánchez/KFF Health News)

Five states have heat safety protections for workers in outdoor or indoor settings. In California, for instance, employers must provide water, cool-down areas, and breaks to workers when temperatures hit 82 degrees indoors and 80 degrees outdoors. The other states are Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, and Maryland is expected to finalize a heat standard this year.

While Becerra said states can create their own workplace safety regulations, a federal heat safety standard would offer protections nationwide, forcing states like Florida and Texas — whose Republican governors have signed laws banning heat safety protections — to comply with minimum standards.

Becerra is hoping states will tap into the programs his health department is offering even though they are optional. Even in California, which has one of the country’s toughest heat protection standards, workers could benefit.

Lizbeth Mastache, who met privately with Becerra beforehand, said the days she spends in the fields picking grapes shrouded in wildfire smoke and extreme heat are not only becoming more frequent, but they are also making her sick.

She has had headaches, fatigue, and nausea from the heat, and has gone to the emergency room after smoky skies triggered her asthma. She and other farmworkers told Becerra they need guaranteed sick leave — to care for themselves when the smoke and heat sickens them — and affordable health insurance.

“I had to work picking grapes during the wildfires and they didn’t give us masks,” said Mastache, a farmworker for the past 14 years.

She said some farms haven’t allowed outreach workers onto their property to educate workers about how to prevent heat illness.

That’s a problem when many seasonal workers, who move for work among different states, don’t know that California requires employers to provide water, breaks, and training.

Many farmworkers don’t get rest breaks

About three years ago, researchers at the University of California-Merced’s Community and Labor Center found that 15% of California farmworkers did not receive minimum rest breaks, and over 40% said their employer never provided a heat illness prevention plan. More than a third of farmworkers said they would not file a report against their employer, most of them for fear of retaliation.

The California Farm Bureau, which represents about 29,000 farmers, disputes the center’s findings, saying there have been few cases of heat illness among its members’ workers. Bryan Little, director of employment policy at the bureau, said his organization has trained hundreds of farmers and ranchers on how to protect workers from heat illness, such as by providing water and portable shaded spaces in the field for employees to cool off.

“They’re doing things every day to try to make sure that we can avoid exposing human beings to these risks, to the greatest extent that we can,” Little said.

While farmworker advocates praise Becerra for drawing attention to the harmful and sometimes fatal impacts of heat and wildfire smoke, they worry federal dollars won’t reach the most vulnerable. For example, there’s no guarantee much of that $50 million earmarked for health care providers will go to health care centers that serve farmworkers, said Amy Liebman, a chief program officer at the Migrant Clinicians Network, who has worked in migrant safety and health for over two decades.

“We need to make sure that our health centers are prepared and our clinicians are prepared,” Liebman said. “So that means that there needs to be a shift in terms of not just this emphasis, but some of the funding for it.”

As Becerra left his podium, covered with the sign “Protecting Communities From Extreme Heat,” he disappeared into the library and minutes later departed for Stockton to champion the next issue — lower prescription drug prices — with Democratic Rep. Josh Harder, who represents a competitive Central Valley congressional district.

Vanessa G. Sánchez is a reporter for KFF Health News, Healthbeat’s national reporting partner.

NYC looks to trees, reflective roofs to curb health threat — and unequal burden — of extreme heat

2024-07-29T20:24:14+00:00

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Arif Ullah walked down Bruckner Boulevard under a scorching July sun. There was little shade on the street, a congested stretch of the South Bronx that leads into a major interchange of highways.

Further beyond were the expressways, waste transfer stations, train yards and warehouses that choke the Bronx’s southern shore, degrading the area’s air quality and contributing to its high rates of asthma.

“We have limited access, among the lowest in the city, to both green spaces and trees,” said Ullah, executive director of South Bronx Unite, an environmental justice organization. “That makes a bad situation worse. That exacerbates respiratory illnesses on hot days like this.”

As New York City faces continued heat waves this summer, extreme heat is an especially pressing public health issue. Extreme heat kills more New Yorkers per year than any other type of extreme weather event, and as summers intensify with climate change, its harms are poised to mount.

“This heat is not normal, we’ve said it over and over again,” Mayor Eric Adams said during a recent briefing. “Climate change is here and is real, and it is a clear and present danger.”

The damaging effects of extreme heat aren’t equally distributed. Each summer, an estimated 350 New Yorkers die due to hot weather; Black residents die from heat stress at twice the rate of white residents. Areas like the South Bronx, with reduced tree canopy cover and more limited access to air conditioning, are especially “heat vulnerable,” and at the highest risk of heat-related mortality.

Confronting weeks of high heat, the city’s Emergency Management Department and its Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have issued repeated extreme heat warnings, emphasizing the city’s cooling centers, detailing its network of sprinklers and reminding residents to hydrate, seek out shade and watch for symptoms of heat illness.

But as heat waves become more intense and frequent with climate change, researchers, physicians, city leaders and community advocates are turning to longer-lasting solutions, aiming to turn down the temperature of the city itself — and target solutions to the most vulnerable neighborhoods.

“The heat that we see today won’t be the heat we see in the future,” said Dr. Arnab Ghosh, an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College whose research focuses on climate change and health. “We need to adapt not just to today’s circumstances, but the circumstances moving ahead.”

The South Bronx waterfront is crisscrossed by expressways, bridges, train lines, waste transfer stations, and warehouses, which degrade the area's air quality and contribute to its high rates of asthma.

Some neighborhoods are hotter

New York is much hotter than many other parts of the country. The city’s heat-absorbing buildings, roads and infrastructure drive up its overall temperature — the urban heat island effect. A new study from Climate Central, a climate science nonprofit group, found that on average, New Yorkers experience 9.7 more degrees of heat due to the city’s built environment than residents of rural areas.

With climate change, scorching summers will increasingly become the norm. Based on city data, New York City could see many more days per year of temperatures higher than 90 degrees, from a baseline of 17 days annually in recent decades to a projected 27 to 54 days by the 2030s — and 46 to 108 days by the 2080s.

Extreme heat can be particularly harmful to children, elderly adults, unhoused people, outdoor workers, and those with chronic health conditions. And its most damaging effects are often clustered in more disadvantaged areas of New York.

The city’s heat vulnerability index shows that neighborhoods throughout the city — including Mott Haven in the Bronx, East Harlem in Manhattan, East Flatbush in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens — have the highest citywide risk of residents dying during and immediately after extreme heat events. Those neighborhoods tend to have higher daytime summer surface temperatures, less green space, reduced access to air conditioning and lower median incomes than other parts of the city.

Many of these communities bear the scars of historic disinvestment and redlining — a discriminatory practice in which mortgage lenders denied loans on the basis of race — which has been linked to higher land surface temperatures. Today, these neighborhoods function as heat islands within heat islands, said Dr. Perry Sheffield, an associate professor of environmental medicine, climate science and pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“We know cities are hot, but there are these micro heat islands now, in communities that have higher proportions of Black and brown residents,” she said.

Trees can cool street by 2 degrees

Efforts are underway to cool New York in the long term — and rectify historic inequities in the process.

The mayor’s citywide climate and sustainability plan, released last year, proposed goals including instituting mandatory cooling requirements for new construction by next year, setting a maximum summer indoor temperature policy by 2030, and installing a million square feet of cool roofs each year, the continuation of a longstanding program to paint rooftops with a reflective coating that prevents heat absorption.

The city also aims to achieve a 30% tree canopy cover, up from the 22% of public and private land that is currently shaded by trees citywide.

“Trees do so much,” Elijah Hutchinson, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, which oversees the city’s climate initiatives, said. “They add biodiversity, they can help with interior drainage and street flooding, they help with shade, obviously. For trees that get added to city streets, they can cool a street by up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit, so a really significant cooling effect.”

The city Department of Parks and Recreation announced in May that it had planted more than 15,000 trees in the past fiscal year, the highest total since 2016. The department also aims to plant a tree “in every viable spot” in the city’s most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods by 2027.

With the combination of an expanded tree canopy, reflective roofs and other cooling street designs, “you really start to mitigate against that urban heat island effect,” Hutchinson said.

Ghosh, at Weill Cornell, is researching how to maximize the cooling effects of urban trees, based on species type and planting location. He said that the city’s goal of reaching a 30% tree canopy is “doable and necessary,” but that maintenance will be key to ensuring trees’ survival and growth.

“You can’t just plant the trees and walk away and hope everything will be hunky dory. You’ve really got to spend the time to see that to fruition,” he said. “That’s what I think the big challenge is going to be.”

Other key initiatives aim to lower indoor temperatures.

The federally funded Home Energy Assistance Program offers a cooling benefit to cover the purchase and installation of a fan or air conditioner for low-income families. The program is first-come, first served and its annual application period closed in mid-July. Its $22 million in available funds will be expended to provide cooling assistance to more than 27,000 households, said Darren O’Sullivan, a spokesperson for the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.

Hutchinson said his team is advocating to expand resources for the program, which has received criticism for quickly exhausting its available funds due to high demand.

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn recently introduced a bill that would require landlords to provide air conditioning and keep units below 78 degrees indoors when it’s above 82 degrees outdoors.

“The indoor max temperature law would be a really big deal because while citywide air conditioner access is around 90 percent, in the most vulnerable communities, it can be much lower,” said Caleb Smith, the resiliency coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit.

Arif Ullah, the executive director of South Bronx Unite, an environmental justice nonprofit, walks down a stretch of the South Bronx with little shade on July 11, 2024.

Greener future envisioned

Linda Morgan, 74, sat in the shade on a recent morning in Mott Haven, a neighborhood of the South Bronx. She was perched with her friends outside their apartment building, an affordable housing development for seniors. The sun beat down on the busy intersection surrounding them.

A native New Yorker, Morgan said she’d seen many hot summers in her lifetime — but the heat wave that baked the city in mid-July was the longest one she could remember. She’d survived the hot weather by staying inside for days, grateful for her air conditioning. Eventually, it had cooled down and the air quality had improved enough to permit a quick trip out for groceries, she said.

“We’re all seniors,” Morgan said. “We’re coping as best we can, not to venture out when the sun is high in the sky.”

Ullah envisions a transformed South Bronx where residents like Morgan can enjoy ample green space and shade and benefit from a re-envisioned waterfront, with interconnected green spaces. Deeper investments in the area are sorely needed, he said.

“On top of cooling centers, we need green corridors,” he said. “We need streets that are lined with trees. We need neighborhoods that have greater tree canopy. We need neighborhoods that have more real green spaces.”