The video discusses the impact of environmental determinants on public health, using examples from the 1995 Chicago heatwave and the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the disparities in health outcomes among different neighborhoods. The video explains how these disparities are influenced by both natural and built environments, and highlights the significance of air and water pollution as major factors affecting public health.

It illustrates how marginalized communities often face greater exposure to environmental pollutants and have poorer health outcomes due to a lack of infrastructure and resources. The video underscores the importance of environmental justice, emphasizing the need for equitable protection under environmental and public health laws. This becomes even more urgent with the accelerating effects of climate change, which disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. unprecedented [ʌnˈprɛsədən̩tɪd] - (adjective) - Never done or known before; without previous example. - Synonyms: (novel, unparalleled, unmatched)

In July of 1995, something unprecedented went down in Chicago.

2. contaminated [kənˈtæmɪˌneɪtɪd] - (adjective) - Made impure or unsuitable by contact or mixture with something unclean. - Synonyms: (polluted, tainted, defiled)

But when that environment becomes contaminated or conditions become too extreme, our health may be put in jeopardy.

3. particulate matter [pɑrˈtɪkjulɪt ˈmætər] - (noun) - Microscopic particles suspended in air, which can be hazardous when inhaled. - Synonyms: (particles, pollutants, debris)

One major airborne pollutant on our public health radar is particulate matter or PM.

4. infiltrate [ˈɪnˌfɪltreɪt] - (verb) - To permeate or secretly enter an area or system. - Synonyms: (penetrate, permeate, pervade)

This is small enough to work its way into our lungs or even infiltrate our bloodstream.

5. disproportionately [ˌdɪsprəˈpɔːrʃənətli] - (adverb) - To an extent that is too large or too small in comparison to something else. - Synonyms: (excessively, overly, unduly)

Decades of studies have found that marginalised and low income populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollutions.

6. marginalized [ˈmɑrdʒɪnəˌlaɪzd] - (adjective) - Treated as insignificant or peripheral. - Synonyms: (discriminated against, excluded, isolated)

Decades of studies have found that marginalised and low income populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollutions.

7. environmental justice [ɪnˌvaɪrənˈmɛntl ˈdʒʌstɪs] - (noun) - A social movement addressing the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. - Synonyms: (eco-justice, environmental equity, green justice)

Enter environmental justice american environmental justice activist Doctor Robert Bullard defines environmental justice as the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations.

8. segregation [ˌsɛɡrɪˈɡeɪʃn̩] - (noun) - The action or state of setting someone or something apart from others. - Synonyms: (separation, division, apartheid)

environmental justice means improving environments everywhere, not just addressing our shared history of racism, exploitation and segregation.

9. exploitation [ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. - Synonyms: (misuse, abuse, manipulation)

environmental justice means improving environments everywhere, not just addressing our shared history of racism, exploitation and segregation.

10. ancestral [ænˈsɛstrəl] - (adjective) - Related to a person's ancestors. - Synonyms: (hereditary, familial, inherited)

These are often groups that have ancestral ties to a particular location.

How the Environment Affects Your Health - Crash Course Public Health #3

In July of 1995, something unprecedented went down in Chicago. A heat wave that ground the entire city to a halt. The heat index, which measures how the temperature feels to us, jumped to a record setting 126 degrees fahrenheit. Chicago was unprepared as residents cranked up their air conditioning. The spike in electrical use led to power outages across the city. Cars broke down and the city's emergency response units were overwhelmed. Ambulance services sometimes took 2 hours to arrive on the scene and then had trouble finding somewhere to take people because hospitals were full and closing their doors to new patients.

The oppressive heat lasted about a week and it's estimated that up to 739 Chicago residents lost their lives from heat related complications. But follow up reporting revealed that the impact wasn't random. A map of deaths showed that the communities most affected were those that suffered from a lack of infrastructure and community resources, mostly in the south and west of the city. 25 years later, Chicago found itself staring down a different headline grabbing crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic. Early in the pandemic, a local news station in Chicago analyzed the number of COVID deaths in different neighbourhoods across the city and an interesting trend appeared.

The map that emerged showed similarities to the map of Chicago's death toll from the 1995 heat wave. These maps describe two distinct health outcomes at two different moments, 25 years apart. Yet the story they tell is the same. People who live in certain neighborhoods have faced measurably worse health outcomes than those in other neighborhoods. To help understand why, we need to look at the role that our environment plays in determining our health. Hi, I'm Vanessa Hill and this is Crash Course Public Health. We often think of our environment as the world outside our bodies.

Like we think of ourselves as being in an environment where our skin stops, our environment begins. But we don't always consider the ways that our environment is sort of part of our bodies. Sure, my body is mainly made up of me, but all that oxygen and water that my body depends on comes from somewhere. Our bodies are biological machines built to turn our environments into stuff we need to survive. That's what bodies do. But when that environment becomes contaminated or conditions become too extreme, our health may be put in jeopardy. The environmental factors that affect our health outcomes are what we are calling the environmental determination determinants of health.

We can divide these determinants into two major categories, the ones related to our natural environment and the ones related to our built environment. Our natural environment is all that non human made stuff around us, like forests and mountains. On the other hand, our built environment is the environment we tend to think of as human made like our homes, streets or even miniature golf courses. When thinking about our environment, public health experts generally consider how our built in natural environments come together to influence a populations overall health. For example while we know that the air we breathe and the water we drink aren't human made we can recognise that they are human influenced.

Like if we take in a deep breath of air we're mostly breathing in nitrogen and oxygen. But not only those things. A closer look reveals there's a whole bunch of other stuff in that breath too. Air pollution is the stuff in the air that is harmful to the health of both humans and the planet. One major airborne pollutant on our public health radar is particulate matter or pm. These are particles like dust or smoke that are too small to be seen with the naked eye and can come from things like car exhausts and construction sites.

This is small enough to work its way into our lungs or even infiltrate our bloodstream. The smallest of these particles can be 30 times thinner than a strand of human hair. And it turns out when you're that small and light you can hang around in the air for weeks at a time, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles. Which is how smoke from a wildfire in California can travel over 2000 miles to New York City, affecting the air quality across the US. Now when we picture air pollution we tend to imagine cities full of gas guzzling cars and smoke spewing factories. But air pollution can come from other less expected sources that aren't right outside our front door.

One review found that because of traffic related pollution like car emissions, children living as far as 500 metres or about a third of a mile of a busy road can experience negative health outcomes like exacerbated asthma. The same report estimated that as much as 45% of people in large cities in North America live within that distance from a busy road. And the World Health Organisation reports that 99% of the global population breathes air that exceeds their guideline limits for outdoor air pollution, which contributes to as many as 4.2 million deaths every year. And air pollution isn't just outdoors, it's in our homes too. Some of that can come from outside elements coming in, but some of it is introduced by the activities done inside our homes.

As we cook and clean, we're actually introducing potentially harmful particles and chemical compounds into the air, which can hang around long enough to eventually work their ways into our bodies. Gas based cooking is one of the biggest culprits because it releases things like smoke particles and carbon dioxide that can stick around our homes. Even baking a cake in a gas oven can emit up to double the levels of the potentially dangerous gas nitrogen dioxide. Then US regulators like the EPA consider safe for our lungs. Then there's the problem of water. You might've heard of it. It's, you know most of what you are like air.

Water is part of our natural environment, but the systems we've developed to deliver water, water to our homes, like plumbing, come with their own set of risks. Water pollution happens when our water supply becomes contaminated with harmful substances. Some forms of water pollution feel pretty obvious, like a Coca Cola can bobbing down a river, or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010. But others aren't so obvious, like when lead leaches out from our pipes and into our drinking water, or when fertilizer runs off into a river. When it comes to our water supply, one of the major pollutants that have public health experts on high alert are per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, sometimes called forever chemicals.

These man made pollutants have a super strong chemical makeup that prevents them from breaking down naturally in the environment. Over time, these chemicals can seep into groundwater, eventually working their way into our drinking water. And because they're tough to break down, many household water filters struggle to totally eliminate these chemicals from our water supply. There's a lot we still need to learn about the long term effects of pfas on the human body. But early findings suggest that pfas could trigger negative health outcomes ranging from altered brain development to cancer. More than 4500 of these chemicals are currently used around the world in everything from non stick pans to firefighting foam.

Now when it comes to predicting and improving the health of a population, one of the biggest factors to consider is the environment in which our homes exist, our neighborhoods, for instance. We know that some people living in the west end of Chicago had it worse than others during the 1995 heat wave. But it wasn't the same in every neighbourhood in that area. Let's go to the thought bubble to see why. In 2002, american sociologist and urban studies expert Eric Klinenberg published a book comparing two neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods impacted by the heat wave, north Lawndale and South Lawndale. Both neighbourhoods had similar populations of elderly people as well as similar levels of people living in poverty, which are factors associated with higher heat related deaths.

But when Klinenberg looked at the heat related deaths in the two neighbourhoods, he found that north Lawndale experienced heat related deaths at a rate ten times higher than south Lawndale. Compared to south Lawndale, North Lawndale had significantly more abandoned buildings, empty lots and shuttered storefronts. Fewer community buildings like banks and grocery stores meant that residents without air conditioners in their homes likely had difficulty locating air conditioning in public places to find relief from the heat. In addition, North Lawndale had sidewalks that were in far worse condition than south Lawndale, which suggested that older residents who don't drive might have been reluctant to leave their homes for fear of falling while walking or unable to leave their homes because damaged sidewalks can be impossible to navigate with a wheelchair.

North Lawndale also had higher rates of violent crime, which may have meant that residents were less likely to leave their homes for fear of robbery while they were away. They were also less likely to crack open the windows or sleep outside, strategies that might have helped them cope with the heat wave. These infrastructure challenges and high rates of violent crime also had social implications that came into play during the heat wave. The absence of a connected community meant that residents had fewer opportunities to build connections with their neighbours.

This lack of social cohesion put the residents at risk of severe social isolation and made them less likely to have a social network that they could lean on during the heat wave. Faced with a lack of suitable options, residents remained in the sweltering heat of their homes and for many, this proved deadly. Thanks thought bubble. So there's no escaping the influence our environment has on our health. But we do have some say in how we manage and build our environments and in who those environments protect. Decades of studies have found that marginalised and low income populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollutions, often because they don't have the support from their government or communities to escape or improve their environments, and because their communities are often targets for things like hazardous waste sites.

Enter environmental justice american environmental justice activist Doctor Robert Bullard defines environmental justice as the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations. In short, the environmental justice movement calls for us to address our shared history of racism, exploitation and segregation to create an environment that's healthy for everyone. And just to be clear, this means improving environments everywhere. environmental justice also demands that we find solutions for these unfair and preventable differences in health outcomes. Not tomorrow, not eventually. Right now.

What makes the environmental justice movement so urgent is climate change. One of the biggest challenges facing our planet climate change is the change in average weather patterns in a region over a long period of time. In the last two centuries alone, human activity and growth has caused our climate to change at a faster pace than it has even in the last 65 million years. In fact, the union of Concerned Scientists estimates that if humans continue to alter the climate.

At the rate we are now, we could see events like that Chicago heat wave as often as three times per year by the end of the century. Now, climate change is a global problem and it affects all of us. But its effects will always weigh most heavily on communities not equipped with the same tools and support as others. These are often groups that have ancestral ties to a particular location, who can't afford to relocate, or who face other health challenges on top of the ones presented by their environment. The good news here is that today public health researchers are working to make the environment work for our health, not against it. Policymakers can work with scientists to create regulations around what we put into our water and air.

Communities can invest in cooling stations and community centres where people can cool off on a hot summer day. But maybe most importantly, we can continue to better understand and address the parts of our society that make the environmental determinants of health affect us unequally in the first place, namely, the social determinants of health.

Public Health, Environment, Social Justice, Science, Health, Climate Change, Crashcourse