Category: Uncategorized

New story came out today on the work our group is doing with Dr. Debby Tsuang’s group in the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at VA Puget Sound Health Care System to evaluate three different remote/at-home methods of assessing cognitive and mental health of older…

Our group is continuing to find ways to contribute to environmental justice initiatives in the state. Last week, I started serving on the Technical Workgroup for the WA EHD Map. The WA Environmental Health Disparities Map was led by Front & Centered, developed through listening sessions with community groups, and implemented by various community, governmental…

I have recently started working with UW Earthlab and the One Roof Foundation to document the impact of new grants provided to Seattle-area non-profit organizations to advance work towards environmental justice and social change. The One Roof Foundation is a relatively new organization, which serves as the philanthropic arm of the Climate Pledge Arena and…

Last week, our group had our first successful deployment of monitors for a new project aimed at improving air quality at homeless shelters in King County. As part of the efforts of Public Health Seattle King County in deploying thousands of portable HEPA air cleaners to help control the transmission of COVID-19 in congregate settings,…

Today, our group released findings from an analysis of seasonal construction workers and ambient PM2.5 concentrations in Washington State over the last decade (Analysis conducted by Chris Zuidema, pre-print paper, currently in peer-review). The analysis estimates the potential impact of wildfire smoke on exposures to construction workers — a workforce of approximately 200,000 workers in…

In previous posts, I commented on the evidence for wildfire smoke protection for outdoor workers. Today’s release of Washington Labor & Industries’ new emergency rule has important distinctions from the previous draft rule: The new emergency rule has two action levels. Before working in PM2.5 concentration of 20.5 µg/m3 (AQI=69) employers must provide workers with…

Washington Labor & Industries released a draft emergency wildfire smoke rule on June 15, and discussed the draft during a stakeholders presentation on June 18. I attended the meeting, and noticed that many of the stakeholder questions concerned evidence on the choice of threshold for PM2.5 in the rule. L&I referred stakeholders to their April…

Today, one of the analyses we conducted last year was published. The analysis explored overlapping environmental risk factors with COVID-19 during the pandemic situation in the summer of 2020 in King County. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-021-01063-y The findings in this new paper complement those from a previous analyses that we did, which modeled the spatial factors associated with…

In March of 2020, Oregon Governor, Brown issued an executive order to develop a proposal for standards to protect Oregonian workers from excessive heat and wildfire smoke. Oregon recognized the the smoke fom wildfires is a health hazard, and that worker exposures, including to workers who may be more vulnerable to smoke exposures, such as…

The major wildfire smoke episode in September 2020 highlighted the need to protect workers from the potential health effects of breathing poor air quality. While the general public was warned that the level of PM2.5 air pollution was unhealthy, and to avoid exposure, no federal, state or local policies exist in Washington to prevent worker…