Book chapter - The impact of health effects of heat stress on social conditions in families and communities
Year:
2019
Along with the higher demand for bias-corrected data for climate impact studies, the number of available data sets has largely increased in recent years. For instance, the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) constitutes a framework for consistently projecting the impacts of climate change across affected sectors and spatial scales. These data are very attractive for any impact application since they offer worldwide bias-corrected data based on global climate models (GCMs).
Health surveillance and workplace surveillance are two related but different aspects of occupational health services. The assessment of heat stress using heat indices and thermal models in connection with meteorological data is an important part of surveillance of workplace heat. The assessment of heat exposure provides the basis for occupational health services. Workers should have health surveillance if the high heat stress cannot be reduced.
Background: Qatar is a major destination country for Nepali migrant workers (NMWs; main age range 25–35 years) in the construction trade. These 120,000+ NMWs are exposed to various occupational hazards, including excessive heat, and 3–4 workers die each week. Our study aimed to show whether heat exposure caused deaths. Methods: The worker population and mortality data of NMWs were retrieved from government institutions in Nepal.
: This report summarizes the social determinants of health in urban settings and provides guidance and examples of interventions that have been effective in achieving health equity. It is divided into 7 sections. Section 1 provides an introduction, and Section 2 discusses urbanization and the urban setting as health determinants. Section 3 describes the urban health situation, including disease burden, infectious diseases, injuries, violence, mental health, substance abuse, noncommunicable disease and nutritional disorders.
In this chapter, the principal environmental and health impacts of energy are discussed according to the scale at which they occur. About half of the world’s households use solid fuels (biomass and coal) for cooking and heating in simple devices that produce large amounts of air pollution—pollution that is probably responsible for 4–5 percent of the global burden of disease. The chief ecosystem impacts relate to charcoal production and fuelwood harvesting. At the workplace scale, solid-fuel fuel cycles create significant risks for workers and have the largest impacts on populations among