For how we live.
Heat, air, water, and the medicine of a warming world.
In a draft TSCA evaluation open for comment until 3 November, EPA preliminarily found the industrial solvent poses unreasonable risk to health. IARC classifies it as a Group 1 human carcinogen.
A Chinese birth cohort of 1,278 pairs found higher prenatal temperatures and heatwaves — especially in the second trimester — tracked with higher creatinine and urea in early childhood.
A case-crossover study in Kern County found the odds of coccidioidomycosis were about 12.5% higher in the 90 days after a new well was developed within 5 km of home.
A prospective, quasi-experimental study links the air-quality gains after China's 2013 Clean Air Act to an average 6.6-percentage-point reduction in predicted cardiovascular risk.
Analysing 4,504 German twins, researchers found the pollution–wellbeing link ran mostly between families, not within twin pairs — pointing to shared circumstances as much as the air itself.
Most people who presented did not have diagnosed asthma. The investigation into the 2016 epidemic thunderstorm asthma event identified who was at risk, and it was not who health services expected.
The 2024 US drinking water limits are the reference point for almost every PFAS conversation. Four of the six regulated substances are now the subject of a proposed rescission.
Thirty-two thousand mid-Ohio Valley residents with high PFOA exposure were tracked through 2021. Of 22 causes of death examined, one trend was significant and the authors themselves urge caution.
Two papers landed within a week: a global map showing 6PPD-quinone taking over from its parent compound along the way to water, and the first human study linking it to cognition.
A detection-and-attribution study across 60 pollen stations found seasons 20 days longer and concentrations 21% higher since 1990 — and separated how much of that trend is anthropogenic.
Dust sampled inside 38 schools in Calama carried copper, arsenic, lead and molybdenum at levels that tracked the outdoor air — with almost no attenuation for arsenic and lead.
A 14-year hourly analysis of the heat index finds a rising trend and a 2025 that set records, with a 'feels-like' temperature reaching 52C as early as 7am on some days.
One study screened 916,904 acute-care visits to find which diagnoses actually rise with extreme heat. Another, in Phoenix, asks a prior question: who calls for help at all.
A study of 806 suspected cases found nearly a quarter were confirmed Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, all the main risk factors tied to livestock handling — as warming expands the range of the ticks that carry it.
Two papers landed the same day. An attribution analysis puts children aged 0–9 at roughly three times the added humid-heat exposure of people in their sixties; a German cohort counts the emergency visits.
Each 1 degree C rise in average maximum wet bulb globe temperature across pregnancy was associated with 64% higher odds of a higher stress category — an association, in one cohort, with no mechanism established.
Three successive birth cohorts over 22 years show falling prenatal pollution and rising test scores together. A separate review explains why the pathway from one to the other is still poorly mapped.
Twenty-three studies, mostly from the US and China, found mental health risk rising with temperature. Nowhere in the Pacific or Africa was represented.
Dallas has held 105°F for five straight days, Texas drought jumped 20 points in a week, and more than 70 million people have been under heat alerts — with little rain in sight.
Eight primary schools in Porto and 40 homes in the Faroe Islands were sampled by different teams asking the same question: how much of a person's PFAS exposure never touches food or water.
Researchers modelled 854 European cities under the climate that exists and the one that would have existed without human warming. The attributable share rose from 45% to 64%.
A national study built for Australia's first Climate Risk Assessment separates the two exposures across ED, inpatient, GP and prescription data. They do not act on the health system the same way.
More than 2,700 people died in England and Wales during the May and June heatwaves. An attribution study assigns roughly 42% of those deaths to warming.
A 22-country survey of landfill leachate and a 39-year Chinese emissions inventory point at the same conclusion — production controls have shifted the problem to waste streams.
A global modelling study puts four million new paediatric asthma cases a year on ambient nitrogen dioxide — and finds that 92% of them occur below the WHO guideline concentration.
Sixteen years of PCR-confirmed data show Buruli ulcer incidence down nearly 80%. Over the same period open water surfaces shrank 25–30% and mean air temperature rose by more than 1°C.
A 34-million-birth analysis maps how far smoke travels from the fires that make it. A companion review is blunt that what that exposure does, beyond the lungs, is still unsettled.
Storm surge warnings that described likely damage rather than just naming the phenomenon increased people's stated evacuation intentions — with the biggest effect on people who'd never evacuated before.
Maricopa County runs some of the most detailed heat mortality surveillance in the US. A distributed lag model applied to the same five years put the toll far higher — and the gap is the method, not a scandal.
Fine particulate exposure in seven Amazonian capitals was tied to about 5,472 circulatory and 2,621 respiratory deaths over six years. A separate analysis finds cardiac mortality rising with forest loss.
An analysis of global temperature data from 1950 to 2024 finds the share of the world's population facing dangerous heat-stress days has climbed sharply since the 1970s, summarized this month in JAMA.
Researchers built an occupation-by-occupation exposure matrix to identify who's most exposed to climate-related heat on the job — construction workers, men, and Native American workers topped the list.
A 121-country model finds health-system emissions are as unequally distributed as the care itself — and that cutting them may not require cutting care.
A national case-crossover study of 236,260 chronic kidney disease deaths finds women, over-65s and people in cooler regions most affected — and projects the burden nearly quadrupling by the 2090s.
As the 2026 World Cup opens, researchers point to last year's Club World Cup as a preview: 31 of 57 matches were played at heat levels guidelines say should have stopped play.
Twenty-four firefighters completed a simulated fire scenario in full protective equipment. Electrolyte drinks beat plain water on several recovery measures, with one preserving jump power.
A global estimate across 8,919 urban areas finds both numbers are true at once — and that the cooling lands hardest in the places that need it least.
An analysis of nearly 30 years of confirmed heat deaths finds many occurred well under standard alert thresholds, and that humidity-based measures may track risk more consistently.
An analysis of insurance claims from 2016 to 2023 found extreme heat consistently drove up emergency department use and cost across commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage plans.
A study across nine facilities in Makkah recorded 1,576 cases of heat exhaustion or heatstroke and a 4.9% mortality rate — in a region where heat-health research remains remarkably thin.
A meta-analysis spanning two decades of research found extreme cold carried a higher relative risk of death than extreme heat or heatwaves — even as warming shifts public attention toward summer temperatures.
A 14-year national analysis finds temperature-related death rates rising fastest in the group that started highest — and the same pattern in cold deaths, which fell for everyone else.
A rapid attribution study finds human-caused warming made this month's record Southwest heat wave far more likely, and doctors warn the early timing caught people unacclimatized.
A new analysis of 198 cities finds 87% have a longer freeze-free growing season than in 1970 — up to 100 extra days in Reno — pushing pollen exposure further into the calendar.
Australian teenagers harmed by the Black Summer fires showed no elevated depression, anxiety, distress, insomnia or suicidality two years later. The result runs against a systematic review published months earlier.
Two February papers put respiratory virus activity into the models. One finds pollution effects amplified at peak influenza; the other finds them attenuated when rhinovirus is high.
A Utah case-crossover analysis found heat stress and pollution interacting synergistically in the warm season. A Louisiana crisis-hotline study traced hot nights to sleep disruption and unmet basic needs.
A wavier jet stream delivered severe cold to three continents in a month that was 1.47°C above pre-industrial globally. Two new studies quantify what cold still does to mortality.
Synchronous fire weather more than doubled in most regions between 1979 and 2024, and over half the increase is attributed to human-caused climate change. A separate paper prices the smoke.
A scoping review found 36 studies on heat and health, only 13 with Gauteng data. Rather than wait for more, the authors borrowed designs from Victoria, Maharashtra and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Play was suspended on outside courts on Saturday when the tournament's five-point Heat Stress Scale maxed out. A ball kid collapsed during a match the same day. The threshold is set on physiology, not air temperature.
A 4.5-million-birth analysis found smoke exposure associated with higher birth weight, not lower. A separate cohort linked third-trimester smoke days to autism risk — but only when counting days, not concentration.
February in Cortina has warmed 3.6°C since it last hosted in 1956. The health question in a warming winter is not comfort — it is unstable snow, artificial surfaces and where sport can safely be held.
A January study forecasts particulate pollution across six Gulf states and reports Qatar highest at 87.90 µg/m³. The modelling is careful; the input data is annual, national and thirty-one points long.
WMO puts 2025 at 1.44°C above pre-industrial, second or third warmest depending on the dataset. The 2023–2025 mean of 1.48°C is the figure that describes exposure.
Cedars-Sinai counted a 118% rise in general-illness visits and a 46% rise in heart attack visits over the 90 days after the fires started. Abnormal blood results more than doubled.
The first national estimate of temperature-attributable food poisoning in Australia. A companion study in Queensland tested whether heat also drives drug resistance in the same bug — and found nothing.
A year of wearable data from 76 subsistence farmers shows adaptation happening in real time. The women in the study had less room to slow down, and their strain readings show it.
Twelve years of English primary care records put a price on weather. The heat effect is loud and short; the cold effect is quiet, cumulative, and much larger.
Emergency restrictions came into force on 13 December when the index passed 450. The more telling number is how many days the city has now spent in a category that was meant to be exceptional.
Berkeley researchers followed older Californians for a decade. Cumulative smoke exposure predicted death better than the number of smoke days did — which is not how air quality is usually reported.
Floods and landslides in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand have killed more people in a fortnight than most single climate events on record. The second wave — water, food, medicine — is the part that lasts.
Across 11 surveillance sites in sub-Saharan Africa, nighttime heatwave mortality risk rose between 2005-2010 and 2011-2015 — the opposite of the adaptation trend reported in wealthy countries.
A November systematic review screened 120 publications and found five eligible papers, all from the US and Canada. All pointed the same way; none could be pooled with the others.
The 2025 Lancet Countdown Latin America report tracks 41 indicators across 17 countries. Heat-related deaths are up 103%, and fewer than half the region's governments have finished a vulnerability assessment.
A 43-year analysis at hourly resolution finds a 3.3% rise in average heat stress exposure duration across districts, with the change varying by time of day, season and region.
Researchers tested heat-mortality forecasts against the European summers of 2022 and 2023. The skill pattern is not the one a warning system designer would have guessed.
A 47-prefecture analysis of a decade of heatstroke mortality finds the alert level set at 33C misses almost all of the deaths a warning could plausibly prevent. About 31C would halve them.
A global analysis separates exposure inequality from mortality inequality and finds they run in opposite directions between countries, and sometimes within them.
A 22-year US analysis links hotter months to more overdose deaths. A British Columbia case-control study finds antipsychotic dispensing associated with dying in the 2021 heat dome.
A high-resolution model of East Africa's most densely settled basin finds that two-thirds of the projected rise in exposure comes from temperature and population growth acting together.
One projects 71,420 US deaths a year from wildfire smoke by 2050. The other projects 1.4 million globally by the end of the century, with Africa's burden rising elevenfold. Both rest on modelled chains, not observations.
A 50-year attribution study separates two trends that usually get modelled as one: rising temperatures and a population that has become less likely to die in them.
A nine-year case time-series across every municipality finds both ends of the temperature range raise mortality risk on a Caribbean island, with the burden spread unevenly across towns.
In New Orleans, five-day heat waves raised domestic violence calls by 7%. Across 42 low- and middle-income countries, drought raised intimate partner violence risk — but its interaction with heat was negative.
A pan-tropical analysis links deforestation-driven local warming to about 28,000 heat-related deaths a year, with Southeast Asia carrying the highest rate.
A 15-city study found a pooled relative risk of exactly 1.00 for heat warnings. Adjusting for green space, population and density turned it into 0.85. Both numbers are in the same paper.
About 1,009 deaths a year were attributable to heatwaves in 2016-2019. Queensland and New South Wales carried rates more than three times Western Australia's.
The causes recorded do not look like a textbook heat event: nonspecific findings, nervous system disease and mental disorders led the excess, and deaths at home rose 64%.
A 55-expert consensus sets out how to attribute health outcomes to climate change. Its sharpest recommendation is against the fraction-of-attributable-risk method that many studies still use.
A study of 5,459 municipalities projects annual costs of $228-264 million by mid-century, with the largest absolute burden in the South and the fastest relative growth in the North.
Deaths during combined heat and ozone days in Hong Kong, preterm births projected across Chinese cities to 2100, and a seasonal flip in Japan's ambulance demand from winter to summer.