An Environmental Health Early Warning System: When Resilient Climates and Windblown Dusts Risk Public Health

Arid regions, the source of most airborne mineral dusts, comprise a third of the Earth’s land surface, where around two billion people are exposed daily to the fine particles raised by wind.

Crossing political borders and traveling on air currents around the world, these particles affect the health of their local communities as well as distant populations—putting all at risk for cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses that are overlain with emerging health issues, including potential clinical misdiagnoses of tuberculosis, influenza, and SARS COVID that present similar initial symptoms.

Risks of exposure are affected by local and regional weather characteristics and climatic conditions that are in a state of flux.

Advances in science and technology promise to reduce the health problems, but windblown dusts and what travels with them can change the fundamental problem and appropriate response.

This chapter uses examples of meningitis, asthma, and Valley fever to illustrate how risks may be lowered through an (environmental) dust-health early warning system.

A half century of dedicated measurements of particulate air quality and of environmental science enhanced by Earth-orbiting satellites reveal the truth of airborne dust extent, and much of its variability in time and space.

These truths have been essential in advancing numerical, dynamic models of the atmosphere which mimic and predict weather systems that loft and transport the airborne dusts that medical sciences and epidemiology prove harmful.

The union of many scientific disciplines and services makes possible improved public health around the world.