AB685 requiring coronavirus disclosures at work headed to governor’s desk

California companies and their employees have clashed throughout the pandemic over whether employers should tell workers if they have potentially been exposed to the coronavirus on the job. Now a bill passed by the Legislature and headed to the governor’s desk, AB685, seeks to clarify what companies must tell employees and state officials about such risks.

Workers’ advocates say the legislation is key to shoring up workplace safety and retaliation protections for employees when it comes to reporting a case of the coronavirus. But business groups are worried the bill is still too vague on what it requires of companies and amounts to a public shaming when an outbreak is associated with a company.

The bill is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature after the Assembly included some amendments from the Senate.

AB685 would require employers to give written notice and instructions to workers who may have been exposed to the coronavirus at work. It also requires that businesses notify health authorities if infections become widespread, information that the California Department of Public Health can then make public.

The bill also creates anti-retaliation protections for employees who report infections, to encourage them to come forward.

Companies are already required to disclose cases of the virus to local health departments, but that information is not public. Companies are also required to report workplace-related injuries to state regulator Cal/OSHA, but there has been some disagreement on whether that includes cases of the coronavirus.

“The bill makes mandatory what many employers already are doing and what health authorities have been recommending that they do, which is notify employees when they’ve possibly been exposed and do contact tracing,” said Charles Thompson, a lawyer at the San Francisco office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.

How broadly a company notifies workers about a workplace infection has largely been up to employers and local health departments during the pandemic, however.

In the Bay Area, cases of the coronavirus at electric-car maker Tesla’s Fremont plant have led some workers to speak out about what they feel is a lack of transparency around potential infections from co-workers. Tesla conducts rigorous contact tracing but limits notifications to workers with close contact to an infected individual.

Business critics of the bill including the Western Growers, an Irvine association representing farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico, have questioned what “potential” exposure means and said that it is not clear what employers have to tell their workers when a case is identified.

“We are still very much opposed to AB685 primarily because we’re very unclear as to what this measure is going to do to make the workplace more safe,” said Matthew Allen, the group’s vice president of state government affairs.

Allen said that a host of amendments he hoped to see added to the bill had been left out but that a clearer definition of what constitutes a work site subject to the bill, particularly in agricultural settings where fields and indoor sites are involved, was added.

Despite the reputational risk to businesses of a disclosed infection, increased transparency about the virus in the workplace will help workers protect themselves, said Linda Delp, a UCLA professor and director of the school’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program.

“I can’t tell you how many calls and questions we’ve gotten at (the program) about ‘My employer is not being up-front with me about what is happening,’” Delp said. “As much clarity as possible will help workers to feel like they are at least being told up front what’s happening in the workplace,” she added.

Delp said underreporting and the sheer number of virus cases make it almost impossible for local and state authorities to track and trace them in the workplace without the help of employers.

“I don’t see an alternative,” Delp said.

It is not clear if Gov. Newsom will sign the bill, but Allen of the Western Growers said he expects it will become law.

 

By Chase DiFeliciantonio

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice

Originally published September 1, 2020 at https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-bill-requiring-c…

Photo by David Fuller

Living near an airport may raise risks of preterm birth

Pregnant women exposed to soot from jet engines were at increased risk of giving birth prematurely.

Living near an airport may increase the risk for preterm birth, a new study has found.

Air pollution is usually measured in volumes of small particles of soot as small as 2.5 micrometers in diameter. But these researchers tracked ultrafine particles, bits of soot as small as 0.1 micrometers, in the exhaust from jet engines. These particles easily enter the lungs and pass into the bloodstream.

Researchers used Environmental Protection Agency data to calculate levels of ultrafine particles within 15 kilometers of Los Angeles International Airport, and then used birth records to track 174,186 births from 2008 through 2016 in the same geographical area.

Compared with women in the lowest one-quarter for exposure to ultrafine particles, those in the highest one-quarter were 14 percent more likely to give birth prematurely.

The study, in Environmental Health Perspectives, controlled for a number of factors that affect the risk for preterm birth, including airport noise levels and pollution caused by road traffic. Still, there are many risks they could not control for, and this observational study does not prove cause and effect.

The lead author, Beate Ritz, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, alluded to these additional risks in people who live near airports. “These are often immigrants, minorities, people of low socioeconomic status living in housing that does not protect them from air pollution,” she said. “Ultrafine particles may be the last straw for these pregnancies.”

By Nicholas Bakalar

Originally published August 11, 2020 at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/well/family/living-near-an-airport-may-raise-risks-of-preterm-birth.html

UCLA LOSH launches "Safer Refineries, Safer Communities" video series

On the anniversary of the Aug. 6 2012 Chevron Richmond fire that nearly killed 19 workers and sent 15,000 in search of medical care, UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health (LOSH) Program & United Steelworkers Local 675 released new videos about California’s groundbreaking PSM regulation to protect refinery workers and communities.
 
The 4-part video series can be viewed on LOSH’s website: losh.ucla.edu/psm

 

SAFER REFINERIES, SAFER COMMUNITIES

California’s 2017 Process Safety Management (PSM) regulation represents the most important advancement for industrial safety in America since 1992, when federal OSHA issued the first PSM regulation in the wake of the Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal India that killed as many as 15,000 people.

This groundbreaking regulation was the result of labor, community and environmental justice organizing for stronger protections from refinery hazards after the 2012 Chevron Richmond fire that nearly killed 19 workers and sent an estimated 15,000 community members to seek health care.

The PSM regulation creates a framework for process safety in California’s refineries long recognized as essential to refinery safety.  Key elements include rights for workers, hierarchy of controls, inherent safety measures, damage mechanism reviews, human factors, safety culture and more.  The right for workers to have a voice is the foundation of this regulation.

It is up to us to make sure the regulation is implemented and enforced  – for safer refineries and safer communities.  To that end, UCLA LOSH collaborated with the United Steelworkers (USW) to create four short videos that highlight the history and key elements of the regulation. They are designed for outreach and education with workers, community members, labor and environmental justice organizations.

Contact them at loshinfo@ucla.edu about worker training and click below to see the videos in the series:

UCLA team leading California state study of air pollution and COVID-19

A research team led by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty has been awarded a contract to study connections between air pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

“We’re really interested in seeing whether long term exposure to air pollution makes someone more likely to have a worse prognosis after they do get COVID-19,” said Michael Jerrett, a UCLA Fielding School of Public Health professor of environmental health sciences who serves as the principal investigator of the team. The researchers include scientists and physicians from UCLA, the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Berkeley; and Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

The partnership with Kaiser will provide the researchers with patient information from a large cross-section of southern California’s population, from San Diego to Bakersfield. Jerrett said the size of that data pool and the quality of the health data is critical to understanding the impact that living in an area with bad air quality may have on whether a COVID-19 patient survives the disease.

“Kaiser has a population base of 4.5 million patients, and we can follow them from diagnosis through therapy to – potentially, and tragically – death,” said Jerrett, who has led similar research projects on air pollution and mortality in California and the U.S.

“We’re hypothesizing that people who live in areas with worse air quality in southern California are more likely to experience severe illness than people who live in areas with cleaner air,” Jerrett said. “Our advanced exposure modeling also allows us to hone in on the specific types of air pollution that could make people more likely to be admitted to be admitted to intensive care, or to die.”

The project is funded by the California Air Resources Board, whose board voted unanimously in July to allot more than $600,000 to the research effort. The work will analyze information from Kaiser Permanente about patient outcomes from Los Angeles, Kern, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties. The information will also enable the investigators to examine whether exposure gradients along socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity are partly responsible for a worse prognosis of some patient groups, as well as examining the impacts of preexisting conditions.

Original post https://alertarticles.info

Is a business near you ignoring COVID-19 guidelines? What you can do

The LA Times interviewed Linda Delp, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health adjunct associate professor of environmental health sciences and director of the UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, about how consumers can act if they see a business ignoring pandemic response guidelines. 

Good morning. I’m Taylor Avery, here with the L.A. Times Business section’s weekly newsletter. As California keeps breaking COVID-19 records — and not in the good way — the businesses allowed to stay open are largely required to follow rules to help slow the coronavirus’ spread.

But not all businesses are complying, which can have fatal consequences for their workers and customers.

Customers and bystanders aren’t required to intervene if they see these rules being broken, but since several people have written to The Times to ask what actions they can take, let’s look at the options.

You could start with a relatively low-key move: Ask the manager whether the business is aware of the rules and encourage following them. It might be an honest mistake, since rules vary by jurisdiction and industry — there are statewide guidelines as well as orders and guidance by local governments and health officials — and they have been changing over the course of the pandemic. (Before leveling accusations, make sure you’re up to date on the rules too.)

If the business continues its risky behavior, you can choose to get officials involved. Document the hazard you see. Note the date, time and location, and put together a detailed explanation and/or take photos.

If the business is in the city of Los Angeles, you can report it through the city’s online complaint form.

If the business is in L.A. County, you can report it through the online Environmental Health Online Complaint System. Or you could call (888) 700-9995 or email ehmail@ph.lacounty.gov.

Beginning late this month, businesses that break coronavirus safety rules will be subject to fines from the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Fines are set at $100 for the first offense and $500 for additional offenses, with a 30-day permit suspension after multiple incidents.

However, the county Department of Public Health receives a vast number of complaints about businesses: some 2,000 to 3,000 per week. If you want to escalate the matter further, said Linda Delp, director of UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, you could do the following:

— Contact your local elected officials. In Los Angeles, that could include the City Council and county Board of Supervisors members who represent your area. You also have the option of contacting your state senator and Assembly memberU.S. House representative or U.S. senators.

— Turn to your social media channel of choice. That can put you in touch with others who have had similar experiences with the business and could put pressure on it to comply with safety protocols.

— Reach out to organizations you belong to, such as neighborhood groups, faith communities or your employer. They may be able to help you lobby the business to follow safety rules. Methods can include the above — contacting the business directly, filing reports and reaching out to elected officials — and can escalate to staging a boycott and spreading the world (with proper social distancing).

To see the full article, visit https://www.latimes.com/business/newsletter/2020-08-04/covid-19-rules-reporting-businesses-business

Photo thumbnail from https://www.flickr.com/photos/iloasiapacific/

Jet aircraft exhaust linked to preterm births

A study from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles from jet airplane exhaust are 14% more likely to have a preterm birth than those exposed to lower levels.

The researchers examined exposure among women living near Los Angeles International Airport, in an area that includes neighborhoods in Los Angeles, El Segundo, Hawthorne, Inglewood and several other communities inland from the airport.

“The data suggest that airplane pollution contributes to preterm births above and beyond the main source of air pollution in this area, which is traffic,” said Dr. Beate Ritz, a professor in the departments of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the Fielding School.

Preterm  is associated with complications such as immature lungs, difficulty regulating body temperature, poor feeding and slow weight gain.

The research team, co-led by Ritz and Scott Fruin of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, examined records for all births—a total of 174,186 —between 2008 and 2016 to mothers living within nine miles (15 km) of LAX. They divided the overall area into four sections based on the amount of ultrafine particle, or UFP, pollution from jet exhaust, with the section nearest the airport experiencing the highest exposure.

After adjusting for traffic-related air pollution and other variables that may affect the risk of , including airport-related noise and the mother’s age,  and race, they found that expectant mothers in the quarter with the highest average ultrafine particle exposure had 14% higher odds of a preterm birth than mothers in the quarter with the lowest exposure.

“Nearly 2 million people live within a 10-mile radius of LAX, many of whom are exposed to elevated levels of aircraft-origin UFPs,” said Sam Wing, a scholar at the Fielding School who also worked on the study.

The research is summarized in an article published July 22 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and is based on a lengthy study from the spring 2020 edition of the journal. Other authors include Timothy Larson and Sarunporn Boonyarattaphan of the University of Washington and Neelakshi Hudda of Tufts University.

By Brad Smith

Originally published at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-jet-aircraft-exhaust-linked-preterm.html

Tech Tools to Fight Air Pollution: Michael Jerrett

Air pollution is one of the world’s top 10 health threats, and now scientists can enlist satellites, but also citizens and their devices to help fight it.

Annual Reviews President and Editor-in-Chief Richard Gallagher chats with Michael Jerrett, from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an expert in geographic information science, for exposure assessment, and special epidemiology. They talked about air pollution, its ubiquity, its cost on human health, and the new technologies that we can use today to track it across the world. Dr. Jerrett is also a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Public Health.

Annual Reviews · Tech Tools to Fight Air Pollution — Michael Jerrett

Mike, what is one compelling issue in public health for you right now?

Well, I think air pollution is a big issue. It’s the single largest environmental threat on the planet. It ranks as one of the largest overall threats to increased mortality and morbidity globally. It’s still a major problem in many parts of the world where we’ve been attacking it for 50 years or more. We still have 130 million Americans that live in areas that are out of compliance with, say, the ozone standards. Many of them are in California, where I live.

So it’s a pressing issue in wealthier countries. But when we go and we start looking at it in places like India and China, where we have these vast populations, in addition to historically, unprecedentedly high levels of air pollution, it’s a public health crisis, a real disaster in the making. It’s slow moving so people don’t always see it as something that needs immediate action. But that’s definitely an area where when we look either locally in the United States, or globally, we’re seeing some disturbing trends, where we haven’t been able to clean up as much as we would’ve liked. And then in these rapidly developing countries where we’re seeing really high levels of pollution.

And some places are getting caught in between the transition from burning biofuels for heating and cooking indoors, where the levels are maybe 10-20 times higher than ambient conditions, and that’s often affecting women and children, and then they’re also rapidly industrializing, so they’re using much more fossil fuel based energies for their electricity production, their transportation, and their cooking and heating. So all of those factors are coming together to create, I think, an unprecedented situation where the levels are increasing and they’re not projected to go down.

Now, what is the good news, I think, is that our ability to sense the environment and to monitor pollution from various new technologies has really improved. And one example is the cell phone. The cell phone, although it doesn’t directly measure air pollution, can be used to measure movements of human populations and individuals. So when we combine that with some of our more traditional atmospheric chemistry models, and other types of models that we use to look at where the pollution is at what time of the day, we can get a much better assessment of the actual inhalation that people are experiencing in various microenvironments.

And some of the studies we’ve done in Barcelona are very interesting because they show that, for example, people spend six percent of their time in transit. But in Barcelona, a lot of people are walking or biking to work or to school, and they do sell at exactly the same time that there are a lot of cars on the road. So that six percent of the time budget accounts for about 20 to 25% of their exposure, depending on which pollutant we focus in on, nitrogen dioxide or fine particulate matter that can penetrate deep into our lungs. So that’s a big advance because we’ve typically used what I’d call the “Mark Twain model” of exposure assessment where we have Mark Twain sitting there in his white suit on the porch, and we assume that he doesn’t move. He stays there all day. And when we have the ability to actually track where people are, we can start to think about what an environmental conditions we really have to change.

So are these studies an example of community involvement in science? Or do you have members of the public using their cell phones to do assessments?

Yes it is possible and we have seen studies where people are… There was an interesting study across Europe where people basically pointed their cell phones at the sky and took pictures at the same time of the day and they had thousands of volunteers, and they were able to sense the aerosol, so the particles that are in the air, from the reflectance of the photos. So they assembled a European-wide assessment of exposures based on these individually volunteered pieces of geographic information. We’re also seeing a very rapid evolution and low cost sensors.

So there’s something called the PurpleAir network now, and it has thousands and thousands of people hosting monitors, which cost about $250 U.S. And right now, I think, in the United States, we might have about 1500 particle monitors that are run by government and we have about 4,500 that are being run by citizens and by researchers. And they’re producing data that’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better to have a lot of sensors that might be somewhat flawed than just one or two sensors across an entire city.

So that’s been a big change and that’s really changing the way that we look at pollution distributions and the way that we try to warn the public. And it’s also informing people about the risks that they face. And I think it shifts the balance of power away from governments and industry, who have typically had the resources and control the information flow to the citizenry of the people that are hosting these monitors, and then it’s feeding into the world wide web and being processed on maps so that almost anybody in a major city in the United States can find a monitor that’s within maybe a kilometer of their house, and they can get a much better sense of what the air pollution they’re likely to face is.

During wildfire events in California, we’ve had the three biggest wildfires in our state’s history in the last year, I rely on these monitors to protect my family and myself from the exposures by closing windows and putting on air filters during the stream conditions that we’ve seen where the levels here during the wildfires go up to levels that we might see in very polluted places like Beijing, China, or new Delhi, India. So that’s another big shift in the way that the citizens are contributing and harnessing this collective information to try to protect public health.

We’re also starting to use these data a lot in research studies because we can put out more sensitive monitors that measure things more precisely and maybe more of the chemical species that we’re interested in, we think they’re toxic. And then we can combine it with these low cost sensors to develop statistical models that give us a much better prediction of where the pollution is in time and space across the city.

And then I think another really big advance that’s happened, particularly in the last 10 years but really accelerating over the last five, is the advent of satellites for retrieving information on ground level particles and ozone concentrations in nitrogen dioxide. So there are many satellites now that have been launched by NASA, and sometimes private companies in other countries, where, with the proper algorithms we can extract out ground level data that’s going to then inform burden of illness assessments across the entire globe. And that’s how we know now that the biggest single environmental cause of death and disability is air pollution, because we’ve been able to use these satellites to assign exposures to places where we really don’t have many ground monitors.

And when you look at Africa in particular, it’s really amazing that they probably have less than 20 ground monitors for the entire continent, whereas the city of Los Angeles has about 42 government monitors and literally hundreds of those PurpleAir monitors. So that is, I think, starting to inform about the magnitude of the problem, but it’s also something that we can start using in health studies. And part of a mission that’s being led by the Jet Propulsion Lab under the leadership of David Diner. It’s funded by NASA, and essentially it’s a satellite that allows for chemical differentiation of the particles from space at one kilometer grids.

And we’re targeting 40 cities around the world, and one of them is in Ethiopia Dama, and then we’re going to look at Addis as well, the capital city. And we’re going to use these satellite retrievals to link to birth records to try to understand why Ethiopia has the highest rate of hypertension during pregnancy and preeclampsia, which are both big threats for the mother because her chance of dying during the pregnancy or while giving birth goes up, and of abnormal development for the baby because it disrupts the placental connection between the mother and the child.

So there’s a good example of how this global technology is going to be used to hone in on local areas where we just couldn’t have done these kinds of studies in the past. And we’re going to learn a lot more about what aspects of air pollution, whether it’s different chemical species like elemental carbon or sulfate or nitrate or organic carbon, which ones of those seem to be most toxic when we start comparing across these 40 cities. And we do have a lot of coverage in the United States as well for that study, a lot of the central, Eastern part of the U.S. and California where we included.

So for the regular citizen, outside of an extreme event like a local forest fire, should we be regularly monitoring air quality through particular websites to see what’s going on, and take appropriate…

Yeah. I think for people that can afford to monitor their own pollution, another thing that they want to think about is monitoring their indoor environments. Because even in a wealthier countries like the U.S., or parts of Europe or Canada, many people have malfunctioning natural gas appliances that they’re not burning efficiently or they’re not vented properly, so you’ll see incredibly high levels of pollution indoors. And that’s something that can be taken care of by either electrifying the appliances or making sure that they’re properly vented and they’re burning properly.

So I think using the PurpleAir website is going to give you a lot more information than you’ll get out of government websites. But if you can’t afford to have your own monitors, because you also want to think about where you know you’re spending about 68% of your time indoors at home, and about 90% of your time in total, is in the indoor environment. So that’s an important source of exposure as well.

The other thing that the sensors are starting to allow people to do is to get messages when they are going and interacting through the environment so that essentially if somebody is entering into areas that are likely to be polluted, they can have cell phone messages that will tell them, “You’re going into an area that’s polluted. Maybe this is not the best place to go jogging,” where you’re going to really increase your respiration rate.

And then on top of all these other sensor developments, there’s some very interesting advents in biomonitoring. So I work with people in San Francisco that have developed a company called Propeller Health. They have an FDA-approved system that links to a cell phone and has a rescue medication, asthma puffer that whenever anybody takes a puff, we know where they are. And we know the time, and then there’s something about recording their symptoms so that they can go on the phone and say it was really bad. And what we’re trying to do now is to reconstruct where the environments are that cause their asthma symptoms to flare up so that we can develop individualized messaging and individualized protection for patients who are using these Propeller Health puffers in the future so that we can warn children not to go into certain environments that seem to trigger their asthma.
So I think we’ll see a lot more of those biomonitoring type devices evolving over the next five years or so. And some of it is also being driven by telemedicine, so there’s a big interest in having telemedicine distributed more widely to populations in rural areas. And part of that is having this real time symptom reporting. But I think I’ve talked to a lot of physicians there. They’re starting to get this information coming into the clinic, but they’re saying, “Wait a minute, it’s too much.”

So another aspect of our challenge now when we have these literally billions of data points that come in, whether it’s from the phones, from the satellites, from the asthma puffers, is how to filter that and distill it down into a way that’s going to be something that’s useful to patients, useful to practitioners, like medical doctors and nurses, and useful to the general public.

How do you think that will be organized?

Well, it’s an emerging area of research. We talk about big data. This is very big data and it’s a multidimensional data that’s what statisticians call misaligned. It’s coming at different times at different scales, so I have a National Institutes of Health grant with the Chair of Biostatistics at UCLA Sudipto Banerjee, where we’re working on statistical algorithms to work with this misaligned big data so that we can pull signals out of it without having the noise just overwhelm all of what we’re looking at and trying to get something useful for exposure assessment and for associating those exposures to health.

Fantastic. Professor Jerrett, thanks very much.

My pleasure.

Read the full transcript here 

Richard Gallagher is the President and Editor-in-Chief at Annual Reviews. You can find him on Twitter as @RichardG_AR or email him at rgallagher@annualreviews.org.

As oil prices crashed, tankers idled off California- spewing pollution for weeks

“The ports are an environmental justice issue,” says Yifang Zhu, an air pollution expert at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “The nearby communities are exposed to so many pollutants from ships and trucks, and the effects are very clear.” Among them, more preventable lung and heart disease, an increased risk of diabetes, and higher cancer rates.

GIANT SHIPS LURKED off the California coast for weeks in April and May, their bellies full of up to 20 million barrels of oil. This floating cache, enough to support the energy needs of the entire U.S. for a day, sat aboard an idling fleet that pumped out tons of pollutants, according to a new analysis performed by the University of College London and shared with National Geographic. These emissions could ultimately affect the long-term health of coastal communities—many of them already at risk and underserved—and they added tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Despite U.S. energy demand plummeting to record lows due to the coronavirus crisis, oil kept getting pumped out of the ground. The resulting oversupply taxed the limits of U.S. storage capacity. Oil trade groups spoke of a scramble to fill up empty pipelines or rail cars, but the most popular option was to charter and fill giant oil tankers. These tankers and their sea-size loads of oil began idling a few miles offshore from major shipping centers around the world, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, California.

For full story click here

 

Written by Alejandra Borunda

Originally published June 12, 2020  at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/coronavirus-oil-prices-crashed-tankers-idled-california-spewing-pollution/#close 

Photo by Roger Marks.

Coronavirus Lockdowns May Raise Exposure to Indoor Air Pollution- Smarter cooking and cleaning can lessen the risk

“People think the outdoor air in cities is not that great, but usually the indoor air is worse” says Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic led people to hunker down at home, outdoor air quality improved dramatically in many cities and countries. In the northeastern U.S., for instance, air pollution dropped by 30 percent. But the lockdowns might be having the opposite effect indoors. In March Airthings, an Oslo-based manufacturer of smart air-quality monitors, noticed conditions beginning to deteriorate in many customers’ homes that it tracks. Between early March and early May, levels of carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increased by 15 to 30 percent in more than 1,000 homes across several European countries, the company says.

The data do not constitute a rigorous analysis. But they fit with a growing body of research, including several recently published papers and reports, showing that the indoor environment is a significant source of our exposure to air pollutants.

Although federal regulations in the U.S. have spurred dramatic improvements in outdoor air quality, indoor air remains largely unregulated. Many pollutants are now more concentrated inside of our buildings than outside of them. “People think the outdoor air in cities is not that great,” says Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But usually the indoor air is worse.”

Spending more time in our home increases our exposure to chemicals emitted by building materials, furnishings, electronics and other consumer products. The pandemic also seems to be spurring many of us to cook and clean more. Those two activities are known to contaminate indoor air, says Delphine Farmer, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University.

Read the full article here

By Emily Anthes on June 1, 2020 at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coronavirus-lockdowns-may-raise-exposure-to-indoor-air-pollution/

Photo by James Rhodes

COVID-19 & Vulnerable Populations

On May 5, 2020, Dr. Linda Delp of COEH and Director of UCLA LOSH, spoke with other leading public health voices in “FIELDING FOCS: Public Health in a Pandemic: COVID-1 & Vulnerable Populations”. Their presentations and discussion covers underlying social and structural disparities that lead groups like Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, informal workers, and homeless to have higher risk of COVID-19 infection and death.  

The content in this video is based on information available at the time of filming. Click here to view the video in full screen.

 

 

FIELDING FOCUS | Public Health in a Pandemic: COVID-19 & Vulnerable Populations from UCLA Fielding SPH on Vimeo.

 
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
 
UCLA Labor Occupational Safety & Health Program (LOSH)     
 
Educational Materials | NIEHS Worker Training Program

Public Health Students

Worker Health and Safety Guidance and Regulations

Worker Health & Safety Support and Advocacy Organizations

National COVID-19 and Homelessness Resources

LA-Specific COVID-19 and Homelessness Resources