Environmental Health

Human activity has accelerated the decline of wildlife populations to an astonishing degree, according to a World Wildlife Fund report released this week.

33 million people land in emergency rooms globally each year because of asthma attacks caused by air pollution, according to research published this week. The study is the first to quantify the global burden of asthma linked to unhealthy air. Asthma affects about 358…

Imagine giving birth in the midst of one of Asia’s largest landfills.   That was the reality for 18-year-old Sairoh, who lives in Bantar Gebang, a landfill where much of the trash tossed by Jakarta residents ends up. As she waited for a midwife to come to help her, “…she…

The cobalt fueling every lithium-ion rechargeable battery—from smartphones to laptops—“is not awash in cerulean hues. Instead, it is smeared in misery and blood,” writes Siddharth Kara.   Kara, a Harvard School of Public Health visiting scientist, documented 31 cobalt…

With scant resources and a tight timeframe—just over a decade—to reach 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, a “nexus approach” could unlock solutions to multiple challenges simultaneously.

In Karachi, the scarcity of government-supplied water has given way to a lucrative “water tanker mafia” enabled by paid-off water board officials, police and landlords.

World hunger is rising, driven by extreme weather tied to climate change, a UN report released today warned.  

CAPE TOWN—With a dozen empty plastic water jugs slung over her shoulders, Rukayah Salie hurries across a busy road in Muizenberg just outside of Cape Town, South Africa and joins the thirsty Capetonians queued up to collect free, clean drinking water from the roadside tap…

A recent federal court ruling to ban chlorpyrifos—a pesticide the EPA deemed safe for agricultural use despite contradictory toxicology tests—underscores the ways the EPA is faltering in its duties to regulate chemicals with a health-first approach.  

For decades, firefighting organizations have been studying the health effects of exposure to toxic smoke—yet the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs hesitate to link veterans’ illnesses to exposure to open pit burning, which would afford them access medical care and…