February 8, 2025
Feeling the Extreme Heat | Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine

In the summer of 2023, Bloomberg School epidemiologist Jaime Madrigano, ScD, MPH, partnered with ISeeChange on a five-year, NIH-funded project designed to estimate the health burden of heat in New Orleans. It aims to identify individual and neighborhood characteristics, as well as behavior patterns, that increase vulnerability to heat, particularly for people who can’t afford to adequately cool their homes.

“The home environment can actually be a substantial risk in and of itself,” says Madrigano, associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, who researches environmental and climate-related stressors with the goal of informing equitable health policies. “We know that people are often dying right in their homes. If you’re financially constrained or on a fixed income, you’re that much more subject to these kinds of weather and climate stressors.”

Madrigano and her research team combined information gathered over two weeks from temperature and humidity sensors in the bedrooms of 70 mostly Black residents of the city’s Upper Ninth Ward. This summer they collected data from residents of the Hollygrove and Hollygrove-Dixon neighborhoods. Additional data from the Louisiana Department of Health will help to provide a picture of the most impacted communities, based on heat-related hospitalizations, and the greatest contributing factors to those hospitalizations.

A preliminary analysis of the Upper Ninth Ward data showed that indoor temperatures averaged 80°F but approached 90°F at certain times in a quarter of the homes sampled, because either air conditioning units couldn’t keep up or residents, worried about electric bills, didn’t run the units enough to keep their homes at safe temperatures. The granular data gathered over a two-week period will supplement climate and satellite data.

The consequences of extreme heat go well beyond financial stress and physical discomfort. Extreme heat is the most deadly of all weather-related events, and is associated with mental health issues, heat strokes, dehydration, and myriad cardiovascular, kidney, and respiratory disorders. Societal impacts include increased violence, declines in worker productivity, and poor school performance.

Extreme heat poses an unequal burden for certain racial and income groups, according to a 2021 study published in Nature. People of color and those living below the poverty line are more likely to live in urban heat islands like much of New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward. There, impervious surfaces, pollution, traffic, and sparse greenery can increase temperatures by at least 8°F compared to greener, less developed areas.

link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *