Exhaustion

Air conditioning has been proposed as one of the key factors explaining reductions of heat-related mortality risks observed in the last decades. However, direct evidence is still limited.

Italy was the first country outside China to experience the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a significant health burden. This study presents an analysis of the excess mortality across the 107 Italian provinces, stratified by sex, age group and period of the outbreak.

It has been reported that suicide is associated with ambient temperature; however, the heterogeneity in this association and its underlying factors have not been extensively investigated.

Investigating future changes in temperature-related mortality as a function of global mean temperature (GMT) rise allows for the evaluation of policy-relevant climate change targets. So far, only few studies have taken this approach, and, in particular, no such assessments exist for Germany, the most populated country of Europe.

In this cohort study of 211 counties in 46 states, social distancing, temperate weather, and lower population density were associated with a decrease in the instantaneous reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2.

We find that, after accounting for meteorological variations, lockdown events have reduced the population-weighted concentration of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter levels by about 60% and 31% in 34 countries, with mixed effects on ozone. Reductions in transportation sector emissions are largely responsible for the NO2 anomalies.

Particulate matter air pollution is widely considered as the leading environmental cause of premature mortality. However, there are substantial differences in the estimated health burden between the assessments.

This article discusses existing research gaps and introduces the EU project EXHAUSTION which aims to fill at least some of them.

This international study is by far the largest epidemiological investigation on short-term CO-related mortality. We found significant associations between ambient CO and daily mortality, even at levels well below current air quality guidelines. Further studies are warranted to disentangle its independent effect from other traffic-related pollutants.

New gridded climate datasets (GCDs) on spatially resolved modelled weather data have recently been released to explore the impacts of climate change. GCDs have been suggested as potential alternatives to weather station data in epidemiological assessments of the health impacts of temperature and climate change. We found that despite different temperature observations the datasets yield very similar results. In particular, high-resolution population-weighted temperature datasets showed better performance. Thus it can be a good alternative to weather stations, especially in densely populated urban areas with large intracity temperature variability.

Although a number of epidemiological studies have examined the effects of non-optimal temperatures on mortality in Europe, evidence about the mortality risks associated with exposure to hot and cold temperatures in Bulgaria is scarce. This study provides evidence about mortality attributable to non-optimal temperatures in adults aged 65 and over in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2000 and 2017.

Results show an independent association between increased air conditioning prevalence and lower heat-related mortality risk. Excess deaths due to heat decreased during the study periods from 1.40% to 0.80% in Canada, 3.57% to 1.10% in Japan, 3.54% to 2.78% in Spain, and 1.70% to 0.53% in the USA. However, increased air conditioning explains only part of the observed attenuation, corresponding to 16.7% in Canada, 20.0% in Japan, 14.3% in Spain, and 16.7% in the USA.

Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that air conditioning represents an effective heat adaptation strategy, but suggests that other factors have played an equal or more important role in increasing the resilience of populations.

We have developed an integrated assessment tool that can be used for evaluating the public health costs caused by the concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in ambient air. The model can be used to assess the impacts of various alternative air quality abatement measures, policies and strategies. The model has been applied to evaluate the costs of the domestic emissions that influence the concentrations of PM2.5 in Finland in 2015.

We assess economic costs of heat-induced reductions in worker productivity at global scale under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. Losses in worker productivity are calculated by using an empirically estimated epidemiological exposure-response function, and the associated economic costs are assessed by using a dynamic multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model. Autonomous mechanisation of outdoor work in agriculture and construction is implemented in the model. We find that under RCP8.5 by 2100, heat-induced reductions in worker productivity result in an average decline of 1.4% in global gross domestic product (GDP) relative to the reference scenario with no climate change.