Air Health Our Health

Happy 2024! Today's episode is a brief one to wish you Happy New Year and to highlight the important issue of radon. You may or may not know if you have been listening to this podcast that January is Radon Action Month . It is important to understand the risk of radon in your home, school and workplace and at a minimum to make sure that your home has been tested if appropriate. To Do: - Ensure...

How do we find out how air pollution is affecting us at our own county and state level? Dr. Laura Gladson has been a researcher with the Health, Environment, and Policy Program at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management since 2014. On this podcast, we discuss the Health of the Air report , which shows how many people are affected in each state and county by air pollution in excess of recommen...

Most of us have very full busy lives and multiple competing obligations. I've struggled to fit advocacy into my life. In this episode, I share some ways I have found that work for me. It includes the following: - Climate Change and Air Pollution 101 - How to engage in advocacy in the community you already have - Start by starting - Whatever you can do is enough Advocacy is an individual journe...

I was working ICU in June of 2021 during the heat dome in Oregon. Temperatures spiked to 116 degrees, which led to severe critical illness and death in our community. How does heat kill so quickly? What can we do to prevent it? For this episode, I am joined by Professor Ollie Jay. He is the Director of the Heat and Health Research Incubator and Thermal Ergonomics Laboratory in the Faculty of Medic...

Kicking off Season Four with a great episode! As the parent of three kids and a lung doctor, I always wonder how best to balance exercise benefits when air quality is marginal. Fortunately, there are experts hard at work on understanding how we should approach this topic. Dr. Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir is chief of the pediatric pulmonary division at Columbia University and cares for patients and con...

Today's episode is a bonus episode. I was a guest on the Healthy Living Health Planet Radio show over the summer with host Bernice Butler and Professor Frank Kelly of Imperial College London, who is an air pollution expert. I think this is a very helpful episode because it does break down the basics of air pollution from a variety of sources and how they impact our health. I hope you enjoy it....

This episode wraps up the third season of the podcast. - Please e-mail me over the summer at airhealthourhealth@gmail.com to let me know what you want to hear in future episodes! - Listen to previous episodes, and over the summer, commit to trying one action from any of the prior episode show notes to work towards cleaner air in your community! - Share the podcast with a friend or family member, a...

Dr. Neeta Thakur is a pulmonary and critical care physician at the University of California San Francisco, where she serves as the Medical Director of the San Francisco General Hospital Chest Clinic , and studies how social and environmental stress negatively affect people suffering from asthma and COPD.  She is working hard to help us understand the history of race adjustment in lung function tes...

So many people begin their cigarette or e-cigarette addiction by using mint flavors such as menthol. Why is this? What does it do? To answer that question on the pod today, I talk to Dr. Sven Jordt PhD, who is a scientist at Duke who studies menthol and shares his own journey with cigarette addiction and empathizes with the difficulty of quitting. He also is a member of the Tobacco Action Committe...

Today on the podcast, I provide a bit of the history of the Air Health Our Health podcast, why I started it, and what ties it all together. I hope you can use this as a guide to catch up on topics of interest, find podcasts that may be of use to you, and pick an action item or two to make the air in your community cleaner. FYI- the episode art is part of a selfie my sister sent me while wearing an...

We think that if a flavor is safe to eat, it is safe to inhale. This is sadly not true, but many e-cigarette users, especially kids, think that if something is fruity-flavored and being sold to them, it must be safe. It is often not. Join me in this podcast episode to hear from Professor Ilona Jaspers, PHD , of the departments of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology, environmental sciences and...

Ozone is a highly reactive gas and forms a significant portion of the air pollution that affects all of us. For this episode, I was joined by Dr. Nicholas Nassikas of Harvard University to discuss the links between ozone and health, as well as to review the staggering amount of money we are spending in terms of the health toll of air pollution. We are spending more on the health toll of air p...

I was fortunate to speak with Dr. Gillian Goobie of the Center for Heart Lung Innovation at St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver as well as the Division of Respiratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She is the lead author on a groundbreaking paper exploring the risk of death from exposure to air pollution as well as the source of the pollution, and how it changes the risk to those brea...

Can we fight fire with fire? The American Lung Association has released a report suggesting that this is a healthy way forward, and our Native communities have used ceremonial burns on our lands for generations. I wanted to talk to someone who lives at the intersection of all of this.  For this episode, I was honored to be joined by Bodie Shaw. He is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the...

The loud drone of gas powered lawn equipment is often part of the background noise in any community, but what do these machines cost us in terms of our health, the health of our children, and especially, the health of those who use these machines professionally? It turns out, they cost us a great deal. Today I am joined by two doctors for children to talk about the impact of these machines in term...

Welcome to Season Three of the Air Health Our Health podcast! It is back to school season, and across the country, kids will be exposed to vaping and e-cigarette devices from their peers. About 1-2 kids per middle school class and around 5 kids per high school classroom will be using e-cigarettes. These devices can look like pens, USBs and more, so you want your kid to be prepared when they encoun...

I had a few weeks set aside in May to record and wrap up some final podcasts for the season, but COVID 19 had other plans. I instead became the head counselor at “Camp COVID” for my three rambunctious children who rapidly bounced back from their infections with no respect for the time their mother might need to finally taste her coffee again. Enjoy the end of the season thoughts, and will see you...

I know we have talked about how Big Tobacco fights flavoring bans at the local level, and today on the podcast, we talk about a county trying to fight back against flavored tobacco. Flavors are designed to hook new users to nicotine products. On this episode, I am joined by Carrie Nyssen of the American Lung Association , who describes the current battle for the health of kids that is on the May b...

Those of you who listen to this podcast know that my main slogan is “Don’t light things on fire and breathe them into your lungs.” But what about when we cook with fire with gas stoves? Today I am joined by Dr. Laura Paulin MD, MHS of Dartmouth College who researches this very topic. She has studied the impact of indoor air quality in homes and studying home interventions aimed at decreasing indoo...

Dr Franziska J. Rosser  is a lung doctor for children at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, and an asthma researcher. She has studied the impact of the Air Quality Index on hospitalization of children. Many doctors concerned about air quality struggle with how to balance advice to get outside and exercise with concern about ensuring we don’t overdose ourselves or our families on pollutio...

On this podcast, I talk to Dr. Dan Costa , who has his doctorate in toxicology and occupational health toxicology and occupational health. He has worked for the Department of Energy in the Brookhaven National Laboratory conducting research on the impact of fossil fuel related air pollutants on the lung and heart. He also served at the Environmental Protection Agency for over 34 years, conducting r...

Enero es el Mes de Acción del Radón y hoy explico qué es el radón y como puede quedar atrapado en los edificios y aumentar a niveles insalubres. Como médico de pulmón que atiende a pacientes con cáncer de pulmón, definitivamente he visto que no preguntamos lo suficiente sobre la exposición al radón en los hogares, especialmente si alguien alquila una casa y no la posee.  ¿Cómo aumentamos la c...

January is Radon Action Month . By the time someone meets me in the clinic with a lung cancer, it is too late for the intervention that should have taken place years before. How do we increase awareness about radon and reduce the risks in the population? This is exactly where the field of public health is so important, so for this Radon Action Month, I wanted to highlight two individuals in the pu...

In this episode, I share my thoughts about COVID while we are in the season of Advent, a time to look for hope in the darkness. I also provide some resources on what to consider for your holiday gatherings. Happy Holidays! Will be back in 2022! To Do: 1- Encourage loved ones to be vaccinated. For more on the science behind vaccines, listen to Episode 3 with Dr. Gigi Gronvall . For more on how to h...

Today, I am delighted to be joined by Ken Martinez , who is a certified Industrial Hygienist and Environmental Engineer with a long and illustrious career in biosecurity and research. His career has spanned over 33 year with the CDC, responding to crises such as the first SARS1 outbreak in Toronto, responding to the World Trade Center collapse, working on anthrax, multi-drug resistant TB and more....