Dr. Fauci Was Hospitalized With West Nile Virus and Is Now Recovering at Home, a Spokesperson Says

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert, spent time in the hospital after being infected with West Nile virus and is now recovering at home, a spokesperson confirmed Saturday.

Fauci is expected to make a full recovery, the spokesperson said on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

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West Nile virus is commonly spread through the bite of an infected mosquito. While most people don’t experience symptoms, about 1 in 5 can develop a fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 1 out of 150 infected people develop a serious, sometimes fatal, illness.

CBS News’ chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jonathan LaPook, wrote in a social media post that he spoke Saturday with Fauci, who said he was likely infected from a mosquito bite that he got in his backyard.

“Dr. Fauci was hospitalized about ten days ago after developing fever, chills, and severe fatigue,” the post on X said. It said Fauci spent a week in the hospital.

As chief White House medical adviser, Fauci was the public face of the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic, a role that made him both a trusted voice to millions and also the target of partisan anger. He left the government in 2022 but was back before Congress in June to testify as part of Republicans’ yearslong investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and the U.S. response to the disease.

Fauci last summer joined the faculty at Georgetown University as a distinguished university professor.

There are no vaccines to prevent West Nile, or medicines to treat it. As of Aug. 20, the CDC had recorded 216 cases in 33 states this year. It’s best prevented by avoiding mosquito bites.

source https://time.com/7014635/dr-fauci-hospitalized-west-nile-virus-now-recovering-at-home/

NASA Has More Disappointing News for Its Stranded Astronauts

The two NASA astronauts stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, won’t be coming home anytime soon. During a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Aug. 24, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the space agency was giving up on the idea of bringing Wilmore and Williams home aboard their balky Boeing Starliner spacecraft—which has been experiencing thruster problems since its launch on June 5. Instead, the Starliner will be flown home uncrewed, and Wilmore and Williams will hitch a ride back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will launch to the ISS in September for a five-month station stay, returning in February. This extends what was supposed to be an eight-day ISS rotation for Wilmore and Williams to a whopping eight months.

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“NASA has worked very hard with Boeing to reach this decision,” Nelson said. “The decision is a result of a commitment to safety.”

The ruling rested on what NASA calls a flight readiness review (FRR). As agency brass explained at an Aug. 14 news conference, FRR’s are typically held before launch, when officials gather for a final go or no-go on the planned mission.

“We bring in representatives from all of the related centers, the technical authorities, the NASA engineering, and safety center flight operations,” explained Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and an associate administrator for NASA’s space operations mission directorate. “We listen to the status of the mission, go through some special topics, and then we poll everybody at the end on whether or not they think we’re ready to undertake the mission.”

On one occasion, that panel’s decision led to disaster. The FRR for the final mission of the space shuttle Challenger was held on Jan. 15, 1986, and the ship was cleared to launch. Thirteen days later, on Jan. 28, that liftoff took place, ending in a fuel tank explosion and the death of all seven crew members just 73 seconds after the ship left the pad. That tragedy, followed by the breakup of the shuttle Columbia and a similar loss of all hands on Feb. 1, 2003, left NASA much more risk-averse than it had been before.

Read More: The Polaris Dawn Mission Opens a New Chapter in Private Space Flight

“We did not have the governance structure that we have today with technical authorities,” said Russ DeLoach, chief of NASA safety and mission assurance, during the earlier press conference. “So at that time, the program managers pretty much had near-unilateral decision making. And so if there were views that maybe a path we were taking was not correct, there was really no strong additional authority to step in and say, ‘Wait a minute.’”

That additional authority exists today, in the form of FRRs that take place mid-mission—though they often go by a different name: a mission risk acceptance forum. Whatever they’re called, the official panels are intended to bring the scrutiny of an FRR to bear at any point between the time a crew leaves the ground and the time they return to Earth. For the past several weeks, NASA has been under the gun to make such a decision about the hobbled Starliner—and to do it fast. The spacecraft’s batteries have a limited lifespan, and if the ship was not deemed fit to carry the crew home, it would have to fly back empty soon.

The FRR that resulted in the decision not to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft was held on Aug. 23, and Nelson was very much in the loop. If there are dissenting opinions during the review, the decision goes first to Jim Free, NASA associate administrator. After him, Nelson could step in, and clearly he did.

Ahead of the decision being finalized, it was still possible that NASA could surprise the public—not to mention Wilmore and Williams—and announce that the stranded astronauts would be flying their dodgy Starliner home. But that was never likely. NASA’s institutional sorrow runs deep—back far before the Challenger and Columbia disasters, to the Jan. 27, 1967, launch pad fire that claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, when they were conducting a dress rehearsal for the launch of their Apollo 1 spacecraft. Shortly after that tragedy, legendary flight director Gene Kranz gathered the grieving NASA staffers together for a grim but bracing post-mortem.

Read More: Fly Me to the Moon Is a Lighthearted Conspiracy Romp. But It Speaks to a Spiritual Sickness

“From this day forward, flight control will be known by two words: Tough and competent,” Kranz said, chalking the words on a blackboard. “Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘tough and competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

That price still stands. NASA could have decided to spare Boeing the embarrassment of flying their Starliner home empty, and Wilmore and Williams the ordeal of spending six more months in space, but that’s not the route the agency chose. Astronaut lives are on the line. A chastened NASA chose not to risk them again.

source https://time.com/7014400/nasa-decision-stranded-astronauts-february-home-date/

Here’s What We Know About Tim Walz’s Net Worth

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has skyrocketed into the public eye after being named as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. A previous high school social studies teacher, with roots in rural America, Walz is arguably among the more relatable candidates taking center stage during the 2024 election.

During his speech at a Democrat rally in Philadelphia on Aug. 6, Walz contrasted his financial background with that of the Republican presidential candidate. “Donald Trump’s not fighting for you or your family,” he told the crowd. “He never sat at that kitchen table like the one I grew up at, wondering how we were going to pay the bills.”

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Walz made headlines when it recently came back to light that the former six-term Congressman does not invest in any stocks, bonds, or other securities, according to a U.S. House of Representatives disclosure in 2019. As of August 2024, Walz still does not have any investments of this kind, per Axios. This sets him apart from many of his government counterparts says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania

“I’m not easily surprised by political information. But to see that he owns no stock?” Jamieson told TIME. “I think there are a whole lot of people out there saying, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s kind of who I am. I’ve got a little pension, if I’m lucky.’” 

Walz’s limited financial portfolio also extends to his other assets, which contain his state and federal pensions as a former teacher and former Congressman, life insurance and college savings, the House disclosure shared. The disclosure also showed that Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz, earned income from a Minnesota public school and law firm Hogan Lovells.

Read More: Key Moments From Tim Walz’s DNC Speech

As a Governor, Walz earns about $127,000 in salary per year. If Walz and Harris win the 2024 election, he is poised to earn a salary of $235,100 as Vice President. According to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, Walz was offered an increase in his salary, but in August 2023 “the Compensation Council had received communication from the Governor’s office” that he declined the raise and his salary will remain the same. Walz and his wife also sold their home in 2019 for $304,000 after moving into the Minnesota Governor’s Mansion, according to the New York Times

According to the Wall Street Journal, utilizing their 2023 tax returns, the couple had a total income of about $299,000, with $135,000 of that coming from pensions or annuities.

But, theWall Street Journal also recently reported that Walz pulled $135,000 from his retirement savings to pay for his daughter Hope’s college education—something only available to the father-of-two through his accumulated pensions from the National Guard, Congress, and teaching. The publication reported that those pensions could add up to an additional $800,000 to the couple’s net worth, which was originally appraised as between $112,000 and $330,000 in 2019.

Forbes estimates that Walz’s net worth as of 2024 stands at just over $1 million—the least wealthy of all candidates on a major party ticket this election cycle.

source https://time.com/7014583/tim-walz-net-worth-estimation/

Gaza’s Doctors Face a New Battle: The War on Polio

Polio has resurfaced in Gaza for the first time in 25 years, thriving in the same conditions in which people are dying. The first case was confirmed Friday in a 10-month-old unvaccinated child in Deir al-Balah, the enclave’s health authorities have said; the World Health Organization announced last month that the virus had been initially detected in wastewater in the city. Now, in Gaza, the medical safety of thousands of children depends on the safe delivery of vaccines to the region.

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“Just when it seems the situation could not get worse for Palestinians in Gaza, the suffering grows—and the world watches,” said U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in a press statement Friday. “In recent weeks, the poliovirus has been detected in wastewater samples in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah,” he said.

The reemergence of polio in Gaza did not come as a complete shock, given the situation in the region since the Hamas attacks on Israel last October, during which roughly 1,200 people were killed. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in the ensuing conflict, according to figures from the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry, which are considered reliable by the U.S. government and the U.N.—and, unsurprisingly, immunization coverage for cVDPV2, or circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, has dropped at a staggering rate. “Any disease that [can] spread that way will eventually spread,” says Dr. Majed Jaber, a physician from Gaza who spoke to TIME from Al-Mawasi, a town in Khan Younis. “Kind of a Murphy’s law.”

Ancient Egyptian art suggests that polio has existed for thousands of years. In 1840, a German scientist theorized the disease could be contagious. But it took more than 100 years after that for a vaccine to be introduced. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with polio at 39 and was left partially paralyzed, announced the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938—named after what polio was known as at the time—comedian Eddie Cantor mused, “…Nearly everyone can send in a dime, or several dimes. However, it takes only ten dimes to make a dollar and if a million people send only one dime, the total will be $100,000.” Parents sent in “truckloads” of dimes to the White House, spurring the rebrand of Roosevelt’s foundation to the March of Dimes.

When Jonas Salk, born in 1912 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, licensed the first version of the vaccine in 1955—by which time the virus was killing or paralyzing more than half a million people globally per year—it was meant to be universally accessible. Salk never profited from the formulation or production. When Salk was asked about who owned the vaccine, he said “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

After the oral poliomyelitis vaccine (OPV) was developed in the late 1950s, the ease of administration made it so that mass vaccination campaigns were more practicable; that form of the vaccine is now more commonly associated with places outside the U.S. Polio has decreased by 99% percent globally since the 1980s, a victory attributed to the launch of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). In the past several decades, the Palestinian vaccination effort was a success story, due in large part to the ease with which parents could take their children to hospitals for scheduled doses. “The occupied Palestinian territory had very high rates of vaccination coverage and that’s why we were quite successful in eliminating polio,” says Dr. Hamid Jafari, Director of Polio Eradication for the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region. “According to the regular childhood schedule, children in Gaza were getting vaccinated at very high rates.”

National immunization days were carried out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on a yearly basis from 1995 to 1999, incorporating the more commonly-used OPV. Gaza had been polio-free, according to the U.N., since 1999. Jafari says pre-war vaccination rates were as high as 99%.

The reemergence of polio in Gaza is suspected to have stemmed from the same strain that affected Egypt in late 2023. The virus could have been circulating in victims in Gaza since as early as September last year. Although a vaccine now exists to stop it, the virus can still spread quickly via contact with fecal matter—a problem now exacerbated by the combination of the displacement of masses of Palestinians with the fact that all five of Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants have shut down, according to the U.N., causing runoff to flow openly into the streets. “Keep in mind, polio spreads in already dismissed areas—areas without any access to the slightest aid,” Jaber says.

Read More: The Infants Among the War Dead

Indeed, the ease of administering both the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and OPV does not mean that vaccination efforts are necessarily easy—and the situation in Gaza serves to magnify that difficulty. 

Of the 36 hospitals in Gaza, only 16 are partially functioning today. Of the 107 primary health care facilities, fewer than half are still operating, Jafari says. The vaccines themselves must be stored at optimal temperature to remain effective, and are linked to refrigeration equipment, which requires steady electricity that Gaza lacks. The trucks that carry the vaccines and equipment also require fuel— a resource Israel has blocked from entering Gaza. Even basic hygiene practices that deter the spread of infectious diseases like polio are difficult. In Gaza, “the Israelis have been strict with access to hygiene products, including soap, toilet wraps, cleaning products, and towels,” says Jaber, the doctor in Khan Younis. “They have turned [them] into luxury products most cannot afford.”

The virus’s presentation is also a risk in and of itself, as it can mask the disease under common symptoms. “[They] typically include symptoms of a stomach flu—like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea,” says Dr. Michael K. Wroten, who runs a clinic for polio survivors at Medstar National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, D.C. Children in Gaza were already experiencing the spread of other infectious diseases. The spread of illnesses of all types makes it difficult to discern the root cause of such symptoms. “It is a headache to even start thinking about polio,” echoes Jaber, between working in clinics in Gaza. “We doctors lack the facilities to manage a child with diarrhea. Now we have to worry about this.” (The long-term effects of polio, such as paralysis, are also particularly difficult to cope with in places lacking infrastructure, which entails inaccessibility for people with disabilities, both physically and professionally. “These factors can put significant emotional and financial strain on individuals with polio, their families and communities,” says Wroten, “especially during times of conflict where resources are already sparse.”)

A U.N. vaccination campaign aims to send out 708 teams to hospitals in Gaza—most of which are hardly operational. But the logistics are daunting. At least two rounds of vaccinations are planned to treat all children in Gaza under the age of 10. This comes as two more cases of acute flaccid paralysis, a symptom of polio, were confirmed in the region as of Tuesday, in a 5-year-old and 10-year-old. According to Jafari, the GPEI plans to implement the use of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2), a modified version of the vaccine used in Gaza in the past, which is more sustainable in emergency conditions.

“Without appropriate interventions, such as vaccination campaigns,” says Wroten, “there could be widespread outbreaks of polio within a matter of months.”

But while the U.N. has requested a “Polio Pause” in fighting in order to conduct its campaign, several people familiar with the situation argue that combating the virus in Gaza requires a true ceasefire. “In terms of implementing these polio vaccination campaigns, there should be peace,” says Jafari. “…and if peace cannot be obtained, if ceasefire cannot be implemented, at least periods of tranquility… should be very clear so that the program can very clearly announce to these communities when it is safe to come out and bring their children for vaccination.”

Read More: Britain’s New Government Comes Under Pressure to Pivot on Gaza

“We all want to be hopeful,” says Dr. Susan Kullab, an infectious disease specialist who volunteered in Gaza in May with the Palestinian American Medical Association and the Jordanian American Physicians Association, who ​​notes that health workers there don’t have reliable internet access in order to communicate with one another. “But the reality is that without ceasefire this is very challenging. Even if [the vaccines] do get in, how are they going to ensure that children get it?”

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, Deputy Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, puts the argument in stronger terms: “No vaccine campaign is going to succeed while the population is actively experiencing a genocidal bombing campaign.” The U.N.’s plan to send out vaccinations, he notes, won’t work without collaboration with both Israel and Hamas.

The resurgence of polio in Gaza after 25 years highlights the dire consequences of war on public health. “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region,” said the WHO, in a statement Friday. As history has shown, polio is a formidable adversary, and the futures of countless children in Gaza remain in peril.

source https://time.com/7014075/gaza-polio-outbreak-history-vaccination-campaign/

What to Know About the KP.3.1.1 Variant of COVID-19

Chances are, at least one person you know—and probably many people you know—have caught COVID-19 this summer. Ever since the “FLiRT” variants emerged this spring, the U.S. has been hit with one new variant after another, leading to a seemingly never-ending wave of cases. The amount of virus in wastewater has steadily risen since May and levels are now “very high,” in part because there’s yet another new variant on the scene: KP.3.1.1.

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KP.3.1.1 was to blame for more than a third of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. during the two weeks ending Aug. 17, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show. And that’s a lot of cases: about one in 34 people in the U.S. currently has COVID-19, independent data scientist and infectious-disease modeler Jay Weiland tells TIME. CDC data also show that lots of people are testing positive and that hospital visits and deaths related to COVID-19 are on the rise.

What will KP.3.1.1 do next? Here’s what to know.

What is KP.3.1.1?

Like other variants that have recently become widespread in the U.S., including KP.2 and KP.3, KP.3.1.1 descended from JN.1, the Omicron relative that caused this past winter’s surge. Weiland considers KP.3.1.1 a “sibling” of the original FLiRT strains, because they have the same “parent” variant but are slightly different in composition.

Read More: Should You Work Out if Your Muscles Are Sore?

KP.3.1.1 has some changes that have allowed it to take off, according to pre-publication research posted online in July. It seems to be more infectious than KP.3 and better at evading antibodies generated both by previous infections and the COVID-19 vaccines distributed this past fall, the study says. A medication authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prevent COVID-19 illnesses among immunocompromised people also does not seem to work as well against KP.3.1.1 compared to prior variants, according to another pre-publication study posted online in August.

Are we going to keep seeing lots of infections?

The silver lining of our COVID-filled summer is that many people have fresh immunity from recent cases. That means KP.3.1.1 doesn’t have as many vulnerable people to infect as it would have if it had become dominant a couple months ago, Weiland says.

Read More: What’s So Great About Cottage Cheese?

“I think we’re at the peak of this summer wave,” he says. KP.3.1.1’s ascent might prolong the surge a bit, but Weiland thinks it’s unlikely to lead to a major second spike given how much immunity there currently is in the population. 

The exception may be among kids who are returning to school while COVID-19 is still spreading widely. There may be a noticeable uptick in cases within that age group, Weiland says.

Will future vaccines work against KP.3.1.1?

On Aug. 22, the FDA greenlit a new COVID-19 vaccine for the 2024-2025 respiratory disease season, and it was designed to target KP.2. Since KP.2 is a close relative of KP.3.1.1, the new shot is likely to work fairly well against the currently circulating variant. These updated shots should be available to people of all ages in the coming weeks, according to the manufacturers, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna—good timing, with lots of virus still going around.

Novavax is also seeking regulatory approval of a shot meant to target JN.1, which would likely also provide some protection against its descendant KP.3.1.1.

source https://time.com/7014374/new-covid-19-variant-kp311/

Judge Declines to Dismiss Murder Case Against Karen Read After July Mistrial

DEDHAM, Mass. — A judge ruled that Karen Read can be re-tried for murder in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, dismissing arguments that jurors came forward after the mistrial to say they had unanimously agreed she wasn’t guilty on two of the three charges she faced.

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Read is accused of ramming into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a January 2022 snowstorm. Her two-month trial ended in July when jurors declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations.

Judge Beverly Cannone’s decision, released on Friday, means the case can move forward to a new trial set to begin Jan. 27.

The defense had presented evidence that four jurors said after the trial that the jury unanimously reached a not guilty verdict on second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident and were deadlocked on the remaining manslaughter charge.

Trying her again on those two charges would be unconstitutional double jeopardy, the lawyers argued. They had also reported that one juror told them “no one thought she hit him on purpose or even thought she hit him on purpose.”

But the judge said the jurors didn’t tell the court during their deliberations that they had reached a verdict on any of the counts. “Where there was no verdict announced in open court here, retrial of the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy.”

Earlier this month, Read’s attorney Marty Weinberg requested that Cannone consider a range of options to prove the jury acquitted Read on the two charges.

She could poll the jury, Weinberg said, on whether they reached a verdict on the three counts or bring in the four jurors to be questioned anonymously. If she didn’t want to accept the defense declarations, he added, she could authorize the defense lawyers to ask the jurors “whether or not they would execute an affidavit that could be two sentences — we reached a final decision unanimously to acquit Ms. Read on counts 1 and 3.”

Prosecutors described the defense’s request to drop charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident as an “unsubstantiated but sensational post-trial claim” based on “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.”

Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally, in the hearing earlier this month, urged Cannone to dismiss the defense motion.

Lally argued that the jury never indicated they had reached a verdict on any of the charges, were given clear instructions on how to reach a verdict, and that the defense had ample opportunity to object to a mistrial declaration.

source https://time.com/7014357/judge-declines-dismiss-murder-case-against-karen-read-july-mistrial/

How Simple Monitors Can Prevent Air Pollution-Related Illness

Air pollution is the world’s second-largest cause of death globally, leading to 8.1 million premature deaths annually from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema, among other diseases. Regular forest fires are a reminder for many in the U.S. that our air quality can be precarious, but in much of the world’s cities, foul air has been a fact of life for decades.

Tracking air quality is a critical step toward preventing air pollution related illnesses, yet monitoring is nowhere near granular enough. Levels of pollution can vary dramatically within just a few miles. In the U.S, there is only one monitor in the Environmental Protection Agency’s network for every 750 square miles. In India, it’s one monitor per 3,000 square miles.

Inaccurate air quality information can lead to wasted time and money if people stay home from school or work because they think clean air is actually dirty, or worse, result in poorer health for people who venture out into dirty air thinking it’s clean.

What the world needs is the equivalent of Waze or Google Maps for air quality instead of traffic, a network of millions of personal devices collecting pollution data in real time and shared with everyone who wants it.

Unfortunately, your phone doesn’t yet have the capability to monitor air quality, but there are many devices on the market that do. These monitors are easy to use, and once installed, upload air quality data to online networks accessible to anyone with an internet browser (users can opt out of sharing data but most don’t). For monitor owners, and those in the know about the network, they provide real time data about local air pollution. While they’re not as precise as monitors used by the EPA, for most practical questions—is the air clean enough to go for a run today? can I send my kid to soccer practice?—they’re just fine.

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An air monitor in every school

While these monitors are widespread, they’re not in every neighborhood that needs them. That’s why we propose installing one at each of the 64,311 elementary schools in the U.S., ensuring every community has access to immediate information about local air quality. 

We conducted research into the adoption of these monitors, focusing on one that has the widest network across the U.S. PurpleAir, a Utah-based company, sells reliable air monitors for between $229 and $299. Tens of thousands of U.S. households have installed their monitors, and they’re in every state and most countries. (We have no financial interest in PurpleAir and they have not participated in our research.)

While these PurpleAir monitors cover the nation, they don’t do so evenly. As our research into monitor distribution in California demonstrates, they are clustered in affluent and predominantly white neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, for example, the concentration of devices is far denser in affluent Palo Alto, with six outdoor monitors in a neighborhood of roughly 4,000 people, compared to no monitors at all in a comparably sized neighborhood in poorer Oakland.

Read More: Less than 1% of Earth has Safe Levels of Air Pollution

The uneven distribution of the monitors shouldn’t be surprising. These monitors are a new technology, and more likely to be adopted by the tech savvy with disposable incomes. But the uneven distribution makes the network less reliable, and creates pockets where less information about air quality is generated and uploaded, predominantly in Black and Latino neighborhoods most vulnerable to illnesses created by air pollution.

That’s why we propose installing them in every American elementary school.

While not perfectly distributed around the country, there is an elementary school in virtually every neighborhood in the U.S. And significantly, where there are elementary schools there are children, the cohort most affected by air pollution.

A monitor at every elementary school would mean everyone can access accurate air quality information regardless of where they live, or how tech savvy their neighbors happen to be.

With a minimal amount of messaging, monitors located at schools will also create awareness within the school community about air quality more generally, and help encourage parents, teachers, and staff to log on. School-based monitors can also serve a teaching purpose, engaging students in practical lessons about the environment and their community.

The lesson of AEDs

While the monitors aren’t without cost, it’s pretty minimal in the context of a school budget.
But monitors could also be provided by the EPA, and both the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act contain funding for air quality monitoring. These devices will likely pay for themselves by facilitating behavioral changes that reduce healthcare expenditure, improve student performance, and increase labor productivity.

There is a template for schools adopting monitors. Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are electronic devices that can stimulate the heart during cardiac events. A vigorous public awareness campaign has advocated for the installation of AEDs in every school, and now about half of all U.S. states have laws requiring their presence in schools.

AEDs save lives, and so can accurate information about air pollution. It’s time we asked our schools to install monitors.

source https://time.com/7013463/air-pollution-monitors-health/