Tag: public health

The Effects of Pollution on Human Cognition & Performance

jkottke:

While I am not a big fan of shifting to an economic argument for things that are already plenty bad for other better reasons (see diversity in the workplace, immigration policy, healthcare, etc.), this article by Austin Frakt on the economic cost of pollution reports on the results of a number of studies linking pollution to low performance in work and school. This study of baseball umpires was particularly troubling:

Pollution may also affect the quality of work, which is much harder to measure. An intriguing study in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists got at this issue by examining how accurately baseball umpires called balls and strikes under different pollution conditions.

Since 2008, pitch calls have been checked by Major League Baseball with an electronic system. In a typical game, an umpire makes 140 ball/strike calls. When there was a 150 percent increase over average carbon monoxide levels or the same increase in small particulate matter, the study found an average of 1.4 additional incorrect calls. Levels of pollution that high occur in about one in 10 games.

Imagine what the rest of us, especially kids, are getting wrong when we’re in polluted areas (i.e. many American cities). (via @tylercowen)

This Zika thing is one big first world hype. Has a lot to do with big pharma too. This is planet is full of hundreds of millions of women who have been safely giving birth to healthy babies in zika zones. That said, it gives them a good excuse as to why she is not pregnant yet. I don’t think she wants a baby but she knows it would be strategic to have one.

anonymoushouseplantfan:

Um, no. Zika didn’t become epidemic until 2015 in Brazil, and the connection to microencephaly wasn’t discovered until 2016, mainly because you needed a HUGE epidemic to get enough cases to make the connection clear. They still don’t know why it causes the microencephaly or what other effects it (or other mosquito borne diseases) may have on an unborn child. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_virus

As a former resident of a Zika zone, I know these mosquito-borne viruses are difficult to predict. They will be dormant for years and then become epidemic and develop new traits. Dengue, for example, is usually a strong flu, but I had a cousin who almost died from a hemorrhagic dengue strain in the 80s. Chinkungunya is usually just a bad cold, but my aunt is still dealing with chronic arthritic paralysis from a weirdo strain that hit my hometown in the 2000s. Zika is usually a slight fever, but I have another cousin who ended up with Guillain Barre syndrome after infection, a side-effect that is even rarer than microenchephaly.

The incidence of side-effects like microenchephaly, Guillain Barre, and chronic arthralgia is often cited as a few thousand out of a million. That sounds small, but when you are dealing with a mosquito-borne disease epidemic EVERYONE gets it and the cases pile up quickly.

Yeah, if you live there, you kind of suck it up and deal with the risk as best you can, but no one thinks of it as “first world hype.” Yes, the diseases are a way of life in the tropics, like tropical storms. But we all know there’s a risk that this will be year that It’s not just a storm, but a category 5 hurricane that destroys everything. Likewise, we all know that there’s risk that our loved one will be the unlucky someone who gets internal bleeding, paralysis, or congenital deformations, instead of the annoying cold everyone else got.