Shady side of the heat
Climate change has resulted in more extreme weather, including hotter, longer heat waves, which in turn have elevated the danger to people’s health, especially those with chronic illnesses.
Researchers looked at how to prevent premature deaths attributed to higher temperatures by examining heat and mortality records in 93 European cities.
Using various modeling systems, they determined that planting more trees could cut deaths from extreme heat by one-third. Specifically, based on 2015 data, the researchers said doubling the current average tree coverage in cities to 30 percent could have prevented 2,644 of 6,700 deaths by lowering temperatures.
Body of knowledge
A newborn baby expels the equivalent of its own body weight in poop every 60 hours.
Get me that. Stat!
Almost 1 in 3 adults and 1 in 4 children in the U.S. have at least one allergy, from annoying seasonal allergies that elicit weepy eyes and sneezes to eczema rashes to life-threatening food allergies, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mark your calendar
May is awareness month for arthritis, lupus, hepatitis, celiac disease, strokes, high blood pressure, pre-eclampsia, cystic fibrosis and better hearing. I SAID, BETTER HEARING.
Counts
Stories for the waiting room
If you got a bivalent booster as a follow-up to the original COVID-19 vaccines, some good news: A pair of independent studies found that bivalent boosters targeting the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and later BA.4/5 strains were performing well, outdoing the original vaccine and holding up against subvariants now spreading across the country.
Related, a Food and Drug istration advisory recently endorsed a plan to move all COVID vaccines to the booster formulation in the hopes of creating a single, annual COVID shot for most Americans.
Phobia of the week
Doc talk
Best medicine
First older guy: “I don’t do drugs anymore.”
Second older guy: “Why?”
First older guy: “I find that I get the same effect just standing up really fast.”
Observation
“God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.”— writer Ron Sims
Medical history
This week in 1968, Dr. Denton Cooley of the Texas Heart Institute performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States on Everett Thomas, whose heart was damaged from rheumatic heart disease. Thomas lived for 204 days with the heart donated from a 15-year-old girl. One year later, Cooley became the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart in a person.
Sum body
Nine diseases keep epidemiologists up at night, according to NPR. These are highly infectious diseases that can be transmitted to humans by animal or insect hosts or by another human. Most produce severe symptoms, and are often deadly. Most have pandemic potential. Most have limited treatments.
If we’re unlucky enough, one or more may become familiar.
1. Nipah virus
2. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever
3. Lassa fever
4. Rift Valley fever
5. Zika
6. Ebola and Marburg virus disease
7. MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome)
8. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
9. Disease X (this is the disease yet unknown, just like COVID a few years ago)
LaFee is a health science writer at UC San Diego.
