Categories
Backyard Talk

They can breathe. And it’s killing them.

By: Gustavo Andrade

What happens to people when the air they breathe is so polluted with chemicals that the simple act of inhaling hurts? When they go out to their car every morning to find a half-inch-thick layer of ‘dust’ on it? When kids in the neighborhood seem to share certain birth defects and developmental challenges to a disturbing degree? When so many neighbors develop cancers at an alarmingly young age?

Here’s what’s been happening to people who have to live in America’s Sacrifice Zones: They perish, as shamefully as Mr. Floyd; with the knee of corporate polluters pushing steadily and unrelentingly against their necks.

No individual or corporation will be held responsible, no charges will be filed, and no damages will be paid to grieving families.

After all, the company settled on this area for a reason: local residents are black, latino, indigenous, white and in all cases, poor. They can’t afford lawyers and don’t have time on their side. They lack political power, are unorganized and don’t even know what is being done to them. To those in power, they are easy prey.

When you live in a Sacrifice Zone, it means your neighborhood falls in the 70th percentile of cancer and respiratory illness in your state. You might have a power plant down the street from the kids’ school, or some type of factory just up the road from your church. You’re told they’re good people who bring jobs in so you shouldn’t ask too many questions about their business.

Now, what happens when those residents start to organize?

Well then, friend, all hell breaks loose.

They start asking questions. They start talking to one another and having meetings. Yes, sometimes even on Zoom. They form coalitions and neighborhood organizations and hold press conferences and make demands.

They start misbehaving.

And that’s how they, like the brave protesters and freedom fighters out on the streets, finally force that knee off their necks and win.

Categories
Backyard Talk News Archive

Trump must do three simple things NOW!

Racial and class division has long been one of the tactics used by the rich and powerful to keep working people from organizing. Today it’s so blatant; as we move tragically through the devastating impacts of COVID-19 there’s not even an attempt to hide or disguise the behavior. I’m frustrated, angry and ready to figure out how to move forward, stand together and speak with one voice. We need to demand immediately that the federal government takes the following first three steps.

  • Immediately reduce air pollution by 50% until the pandemic is over. 

EPA announced in March that they will no longer monitor air or enforce environmental regulations. Families who live around polluting facility are forced to shelter in place — with their “place” so polluted that they cannot go outdoors and cannot open windows. The chemicals are respiratory irritants.

  • First test people in the vulnerable areas which are low income, black and brown communities and senior centers.

Black and brown people make up the majority of “essential front-line workers.”  These essential workers drive trucks, process food, run public transportation, clean hospitals and so much more. Today if you have money not you are an essential worker you can get tested.

  • Expand health care access through mobile clinic or other means to vulnerable communities (usually health care deserts).

You just need to listen to the news to see that athletes, famous TV people, rich families have no problems getting a test if they want one. Patrick Ewing tested positive, went to the hospital and is now healing at home. Patrick’s a great basketball coach/player we wish him well. But Mr. Hernandez and Thomas were unable to receive a test. After driving a long distances to seek help, there is no medical facilities in their communities, they were turned away (even with COVID symptoms) told to go home and quarantine themselves. This is just not right.

Categories
Backyard Talk

A Pandemic of Pollution

The death toll due to Covid-19 passed the 90,000 mark in the United States this week. This is a truly staggering if not sobering number that raises many questions about how we as a nation respond to this incredible loss of life. These are not just numbers, but people – someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, friend, lover, child… The daily news boils this down to statistics. Numbers of new cases and deaths are reported each day before the newscaster moves on to the next story. Are we normalizing this staggering loss of life? Even worse, are we accepting it?
Yet I look at the leadership of this country and I don’t see people who empathize with those who have lost someone to this deadly virus. I don’t see people who are taking steps to minimize the impact of this insidious virus.
There is still much that we don’t know about Covid-19 and its effects on people, but it is becoming quite clear that low income residents and people of color are disproportionately impacted by exposure to the coronavirus. It’s also become clear that underlying health conditions, such as respiratory problems like asthma and COPD; diabetes, high blood pressure, immune diseases like lupus multiple sclerosis make people more vulnerable to covid-19, not just among the elderly, but among people of color and others with these diseases.
Why then is the USEPA doing all that it can to dismantle (repeal or weaken) regulations that protect people’s health. A report released today by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee describes how specific actions taken by EPA to weaken or repeal air pollution rules and regulations will “harm public health and potentially add to COVID-19 risks.”
The report specifically points to seven rules that were initially designed to remove greenhouse gas, soot, mercury and other pollution from the air that the agency has targeted and proposed or finalized actions since March 1st that “will result in increased air pollution and could cause tens of thousands of premature deaths. EPA has, in short, unleashed a pandemic of pollution in the middle of an actual pandemic, the respiratory effects of which may be amplified by pollution exposure.”
The committee is clear that the agency should reverse its deregulating efforts and strengthened rather than weaken the country’s air pollution laws and regulations, and take steps to address the Covid-19 specific risks posed by air pollution. In the committee’s words:
“EPA should re-focus its enforcement, compliance and monitoring activities in a manner that prioritizes the early detection of high exposure to air pollutants in communities that have both historically experienced such exposures and those at greatest risk of adverse outcomes from COVID-19.”
This and other recommendations made by the Senate Committee offer hope that we will not accept 90,000 deaths and counting as the cost of doing business in the United States. There are steps we can take to reduce and minimize the impacts of Covid-19.
Read the full report here.

Categories
Backyard Talk

Is It A Surprise That Low-Income and Communities Of Color Are At Higher Risk of Serious Illnesses If Infected With The Coronavirus ???

Blog by Sharon Franklin
 
On May 7, 2020  A group from the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. has steadily climbed.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local governments continue to release data about the characteristics of people who have developed serious illness when infected with coronavirus, as well as the number of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19.  The emerging national and state level data suggest that serious illness resulting from coronavirus disproportionately affects people in communities of color, due to the underlying health and economic challenges.  Notably, adults with low incomes are more likely to have higher rates of chronic conditions compared to adults with high incomes, which could increase their risk of serious illness, if infected with coronavirus.
The Key Findings Show
In a previous study this research group found that approximately one in five adults (21%) ages 18-64 have a higher risk of developing serious illness, if they become infected with the coronavirus due to underlying health conditions.  In this study they found that American Indian/Alaska Native and Black Adults are at higher risk of serious illness if infected with coronavirus than White adults.  More than one in three (34%) American Indian/Alaska Native and 27% Black Adults are at higher risk of serious Illness if infected with the Coronavirus, greater than other racial and ethnic groups.  
first
More than one in four (27%) Black non-elderly adults who are at a higher risk of serious illness if infected with the coronavirus, compared to about one in five (21%) of White adults.
More than one in three (35%) non-elderly adults with household incomes below $15,000 are at higher risk of serious illness if infected with coronavirus, compared to about one in seven (16%) adults with household incomes greater than $50,000 See Figure 2.
 
 
second
Conclusion: American Indian/Alaska Native and Black Adults are at higher risk of serious illness if infected with the Coronavirus, compared to White adults; and  A larger share of non-elderly adults with lower household income compared to higher household incomes have a greater risk of serious illness if they are infected with the coronavirus. 
Why? 

To learn more click here. 
 

Categories
Backyard Talk News Archive

Stand Up Fight Back! Protect the most Vulnerable Communities

Do you have friends or family members who live in a vulnerability zone? Check out the map below.

The first map looks at high risk facilities across the U.S. These high risk communities are especially important now that Trump’s EPA is no longer requiring monitoring and will not take enforcement actions.

dangerous facilities near residential neighborhoods.Across the United States, almost 12,500 high-risk chemical facilities place 39% of the U.S. population, 124 million people, who live within three miles of these facilities at constant risk of chemical disaster. The full vulnerability zones for these industrial and commercial sites can extend up to twenty five miles in radius.  You can click on the link below to see if your community is at risk.
Whether you live in these areas or not CHEJ could use your help signing and circulating this petition.  The petition is demanding that President Trump revokes EPA’s decision to not enforce environmental laws and regulations and allow dangerous industries to operate without monitoring what they are putting into the air. Allowing polluters to spew more toxins will exacerbate the suffering and death toll from pollution and COVID19. This is a cruel, cynical, and unneeded attempt to put polluter profits before public health. We have to fight back.
Those dots on the first map and the dark purple areas on the second represent the type of communities CHEJ works with. Our No More Sacrifice Zones Campaign is about reducing the toxic pollution in air of vulnerable communities. We need your support to gain the people power we need to create the policy changes we need to protect innocent families. Join our No More Sacrifice Zones campaign to create a solution from the bottom up.

Categories
Backyard Talk

Vulnerability to Pollution and Susceptibility to Covid-19

A new screening tool is now available that identifies populations across the country that are most vulnerable to severe complications following exposure to the coronavirus and development of covid-19. This community vulnerability map which was developed by Jvion, a health care data firm, in collaboration with Microsoft. Jvion uses socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to pollution, unemployment and mortality rates at the census block level to identify communities vulnerable to severe effects of covid-19.
In an article about his new mapping tool in Grist magazine, Jvion is described as using “machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to identify ‘environmental health hazards’ as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable  to severe covid-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor respiratory air pollutants such as fine particulate matter can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease – preexisting conditions that make exposure to the novel corona virus more severe and fatal.”
This interactive and searchable map differs from others available on the internet in that it identifies the populations that once infected will likely experience severe outcomes ranging from hospitalization to death.
This vulnerability map can be used together with the USEPA’s EJScreen, an Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping tool. The EJScreen uses 11 environmental and health indicators and standard demographic data to identify communities most susceptible to air quality pollution. The EJ screen specifically includes a cancer risk and respiratory hazard index that is provided as a percentile in the state or nationally.
When the vulnerability mapping tool is matched with the EPA’s EJ Screen, the results are astounding. The relationship between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and the projected risk of severe covid-19 outcomes is very clear and very strong. The areas of high vulnerability identified on the Community Vulnerability map match well with areas with high pollution from industrial facilities identified by the EJScreen, painting an all too familiar picture of communities suffering disproportionately from multiple and cumulative risks.
The preexisting respiratory and other health conditions that African Americans suffer from living in the shadows of industrial facilities in sacrifice zones across the country contribute significantly to their susceptibility to the lethal effects of covid-19. This reality isn’t an accident, but the result of economic and environmental conditions imposed on people of color over the long history of discrimination in this country.
In spite of these obvious disparities and the growing threat that people of color and African Americans in particular face from covid-19, EPA announced this month that it has stopped enforcing regulations that hold corporate polluters accountable for releasing toxic chemicals into the air we breathe. This is another outrage. Sign our petition to demand that the government reverse this disastrous decision.

Categories
Backyard Talk

COVID-19 vs Past Pandemics

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]

(CDC)

Blog by: Joy Barua
COVID-19 has caused a major disruption in the entire world and have paused our daily life. It might even go down as the greatest challenge of its kind that we have faced in our lifetime. While the world is on pause and is unpredictable at the moment there is still hope that we will come out of this stronger than before.
As of this writing, there are 1,289,380 cases of COVID-19 in the world and a total of 70,590 deaths according to the John Hopkins Coronavirus resource center. That adds up to about a 5% case fatality rate (CFR). However, that 5% doesn’t paint the entire picture as to when looking at individual countries, the numbers shifts dramatically as for example, the CFR in Italy currently stands at 12%. It changes more for better or worse when dividing things up by regions or states in each country. For example, in our nation, the cases and CFR in New York are significantly higher than the rest of the country.
To provide a bit of background, COVID-19 is a single-stranded RNA virus. It is a zoonotic disease. Over the past 100 years or so, zoonotic diseases have become a major concern for the world of public health. Millions of people die each year due to some form of zoonotic diseases. Some of the deadliest zoonotic diseases includes Ebola, West Nile, Lyme Disease, Nipah Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)and now COVID-19 which happens to be a strain of SARS or known as SARS-CoV-2. The first SARS outbreak took place in 2003 and also started in China. There are many more emerging zoonotic infectious diseases that are appearing in some of the lower-income countries. Most of the zoonotic diseases are considered to be RNA viruses. For those not aware, RNA viruses are considered more threatening than DNA viruses cause of their high mutation rate compared to DNA viruses.  As a result, creating a vaccine for an RNA virus takes longer than it would for a DNA virus.
[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]
(CDC)

The goal of this writing is not to give you information that you are already aware of but to provide in-context how COVID-19 compares to past pandemics. Going back to the 1918 pandemic of the H1N1 virus, known as the Spanish Flu, infected about 500 million people or at the time 1/3 of the population. It claimed 50 million lives. That works up to a 10% CFR which is much higher than the current CFR of COVID-19. But similar to COVID-19, mortality was higher among the under 5 and over 65 age groups.
There was a second strand of flu pandemic in 1957 known as H2N2 or the Asian flu that claimed 1.1 million lives. Not long after, a third strand of the flu pandemic took place in 1968 known as the H3N2 virus that claimed another million lives. Similarly, the mortality rate was higher among those ages 65 and higher. The latest flu pandemic took place in 2009 known as the swine flu pandemic of the H1N1 virus. While it infected nearly 1.5 billion people, the CFR was much lower compared to past pandemics with deaths of about half a million people. There have also been other pandemics such as the Ebola outbreak, Zika (still active), HIV/AIDS pandemic (still active).
With the emergence of every new pandemic, the mortality rate slowly decreases. While the statistics differentiate between DNA and an RNA viruses, with the advancement of modern technology and modern medicine we are better equipped to deal with these types of pandemics than ever before. As COVID-19 continues to progress and has yet to peak in certain areas, just know that while it is still deadly, there is still hope that we will come out of this stronger than before.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Categories
Backyard Talk

COVID-19 Is Bad & Could Be “A Double Whammy” For People in Texas

 
Blog by Sharon Franklin
DaLyah Jones a staff writer for Texas Observer covering the environment reported on March 25, 2020 that COVID-19 Could Be a Double Whammy for Those in Pollution Hotspots.
Ms. Jones reports that air pollution across the globe has sharply dropped, an unintended silver lining of COVID-19,  as the coronavirus continues to spread.  However, Texas environmental advocates are bracing for impacts that can’t be reversed by a few weeks of reduced industrial production and air travel. Why is this? Because Texans living in polluted areas who breathe polluted air are more likely to have preexisting health issues, and are also at a higher risk of getting seriously ill from the virus.  Currently, there have not been any large-scale studies of how air pollution can complicate COVID-19.  However, experts say that lung damage caused by poor air quality or smoking could poses a “double-whammy effect”, to these individuals because it can only be exacerbated by pollution hotspots and COVID-19, as noted by Elena Craft, of the Environmental Defense Fund.
888
Researchers at Environment Texas utilizing 2016 data found that roughly 20 metropolitan and rural areas in Texas had elevated levels of particulate matter and smog. In the Houston metro area there are many hotspots (Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Fort Bend, Harris, Liberty, Montgomery, and Waller counties) that currently don’t meet the national air-quality standards.  Additionally, Dr. Brett Perkison, MD, Professor of Occupational Medicine, University of Texas School of Public Health says that those much-needed defenses are further taxed “by exposure day after day, year after year, to high levels of ozone and nitric oxide.”
According to a study conducted by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, some of the nation’s largest African American populations are at risk for childhood asthma are in the cities of Dallas and Houston.  Researchers also found that Texas was one of three states to have the most African Americans living within a half-mile of an oil or natural gas facility.  Dr. Perkison further says “Low-socioeconomic communities that occur near manufacturing or industrial sites are at more risk for acute and chronic disease, and we need to take it seriously to allocate resources adequately.”  Dr. Perkison encourages at-risk residents to take even more precautions, especially when concentrations of ground-level ozone are high, which includes limiting their time outdoors, monitoring their breathing, or only going outside in the morning, before ozone forms.
Researchers have already begun looking at neighborhoods that face elevated risks.  A team at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston mapped the potential risk of severe COVID-19 in Harris County by identifying residents who are 60 and older that have one or more chronic conditions.  The study found that the East Little York, Deer Park, Channelview, and East End neighborhoods saw the highest concentration of people over 60 or with a chronic disease.
Reverend James Caldwell, a founder of Coalition of Community Organizations, says the virus has increased a “myriad of issues” for communities like Houston’s Fifth Ward that are located near Superfund sites and has seen elevated cases of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.  Reverend Caldwell notes, many residents with preexisting conditions are also uninsured.  He asks “Why does it cost out of pocket to just stay alive?”
 
 Photo:  Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle Via AP
 

Categories
Backyard Talk

Shelter In Place Can Be Very Different Depending on Where You Live

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice team and I send our compassion, support and affection to those whose health and livelihoods may be affected by COVID-19. This is a worldwide crisis on a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes. We are thinking of you, your family, friends and neighbors.
As you know our team has always been about families, communities and people and at all times working on issues from the grassroots to the White House not the other way around. For the first time, the entire country now has a better understanding of the horrors of “sheltering in place.”  Hundreds of our member’s communities, maybe you live in one, have been told to shelter in place because of an explosion from a pipeline, refinery, chemical plant and other releases.
I feel safe in my home, even though I’m in the high risk age range. I am also grateful that I have a place to stay with food, water and clean air, until the public health crisis is over. I can work from home, hold virtual meetings, talk with my friends through the phone, Facebook or e-mail. As terrifying as this virus is I still feel safe, maybe I shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, safe is not how so many of communities CHEJ works with feel, when asked to shelter in place because of an environmental release or explosion. There are a number of reason for their fears.
–No one told them something was going to happen and they should seek safe shelter, stock up on food, water and toilet paper.
–There wasn’t days of news castors telling folks what scientists think the real dangers are, what health symptoms people should look out for or the speed of the poison touching communities as it moves across the world.
–No federal or state health agency was working around the clock to ensure everyone exposed would receive critical health care if needed, regardless of whether they’re insured.
I invite you to read or reread the article we reprinted on our web from the New York Times authored by Ana Parras a local activist in TX.
 
In Texas and across the country, the E.P.A.’s gutting of the Chemical Disaster Rule is a matter of life or death.
While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift shelters. The reason? Two explosions at the Texas Petroleum Chemical plant sent flames into the sky, injured eight people, and released plumes of butadiene, a carcinogen, into the air.
The disaster erupted six days after the Trump administration gutted Obama-era regulations meant to improve safety at 12,000 chemical plants around the country.
It’s too soon to say whether these now abandoned rules would have made a difference in Port Neches. But there is no question that the communities that surround these thousands of plants are less safe now.
This regulatory rollback gives chemical plants across the country a free pass, in pursuit of greater profits, to operate in a way that endangers families and workers.
There are over 2,500 chemical facilities in the Houston area. Manchester, the neighborhood where Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services works, is among those most affected by this negligence. There are 30 chemical plants and waste sites in the Manchester area that report to the Environmental Protection Agency. When an explosion happens, nearby neighborhoods, mostly Latinx and people of color, are exposed to this toxicity.
And these toxic blasts are not infrequent. The last chemical explosion in Houston to garner national attention was in March at the Intercontinental Terminals Co., a few miles east of Manchester. This explosion led to high benzene levels in the air, school closures and community shelter-in-place orders for days: stay where you are, turn off air conditioning. Some advisories told people to put a plastic tarp over their windows, sealed with duct tape, to prevent air from coming in.
Federal regulations were supposed to protect us. For years, organizations like United Steelworkers, Greenpeace and dozens of other community and environmental organizations pressured the E.P.A. to make chemical disaster prevention a priority.
The turning point happened in 2013 when an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex., 200 miles northwest of Houston, killed 15 people and injured over 260.
Later that year, President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to create a task force. What emerged was the Chemical Disaster Rule, a proposal to improve plant safety and protect surrounding communities, which the former E.P.A. administrator Gina McCarthy approved one month before President Trump took office.
Two months later, the Trump administration blocked the regulations from taking effect, and now the E.P.A. has released a final rule that eviscerates the Obama-era requirements. The agency rescinded major accident prevention provisions, including requirements to consider safer technology, audits of accidents by outside parties and “root cause” analyses of accidents.
While Texas has the largest number of chemical facilities in the country, Illinois, California, Iowa and Louisiana are riddled with them, too. As The Houston Chronicle has documented, no state is spared from having at least one facility that could have toxic or flammable chemical accidents with consequences that extend beyond the site.
The E.P.A. calls these communities — areas that could be affected by a release from a chemical accident — “vulnerable zones.” One in three children in America attends a school in a vulnerable zone. This means that over 19 million children are at risk of exposure to the harmful chemicals that these plants use, store and can emit when they produce plastics, pesticides, adhesives and other products.
Our neighborhoods in Houston are a case in point. The oil and gas facilities and chemical plants along the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel have turned the air in Harris County into a public health hazard, significantly increasing the likelihood of residents’ developing cancer and respiratory problems — and shortening the lives of children. Children living near the Houston Ship Channel are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia than those who live more than 10 miles away.
To me this issue is personal. Yes, explosions from chemical facilities can be deadly. But the long-term impact of exposure to toxic chemicals also kills. In 2016, I was found to have hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a rare autoimmune system disorder that arises from breathing in dust or toxins repeatedly. The doctors blamed indoor air, but I am convinced that exposure to chemicals in Houston led to my condition. In this town, there’s little distinction between the air indoors and what’s outside.
When traveling — I am now at the U.N. Climate talks in Madrid — I bring a portable oxygen machine in case I need it. I am unable to walk long distances, and I move slowly because of my shortness of breath. Public speaking is difficult, as is any exertion. My life expectancy is not long (10 years, one doctor told me). I hope it is more.
In my family, lung diseases are the norm. My diagnosis came the same year that my father, Gregorio V. García, died of lung cancer at 79. He worked in the Asarco Refinery in Corpus Christi, Tex., and was a member of United Steelworkers for 30 years. Workers in these refineries are the first exposed to toxic substances. Many, like him, have died of cancer.
Plants like the nearby Valero facility emit a slew of poisonous chemicals like benzene and hydrogen cyanide into our neighborhoods. Far too often, they fail to meet Clean Air Act requirements.
During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, I felt what it was like to breathe in a concentrated amount of toxic air. On the day of the worst flooding, my husband and I drove his pickup truck into Manchester to document what was happening at the Valero refinery. We saw water running from Valero into Hartman Park, where children gather to play baseball and soccer, and down the streets we knew well. As we drove, we had to cover our nose and mouth with our hands. My lips turned numb. The odor was so strong that it made me nauseated.
Three days later we found out that we had driven into one of the largest benzene spills. Benzene is clear, colorless and flammable. To date, this spill has not been adequately addressed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
In Houston, we struggle to get chemical facilities to follow the law. We ask our state to protect us from chemicals that no one should breathe. Now the federal government is ending safeguards that the E.P.A. only a few years ago said the industry needed to protect the lives of workers, emergency medical workers and communities like mine.
My life should not be a pawn for leveraging industry profits. Nor should those of my neighbors and their children. Families and workers in these neighborhoods deserve to be safe.
As disasters continue to happen, we — those most affected, those who breathe and live and play in toxicity — condemn the E.P.A.’s decision to repeal the Chemical Disaster Rule. We are denied basic health protections simply because the industry does not want to invest in our safety.
Families and workers across the country should not have to pay the ultimate cost of this administration’s refusal to do its job: our lives.
Ana Parras is a co-executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios).
 

Categories
Backyard Talk

The Coronavirus Outbreak

This blog was recently published by Hesperian Health Guides.

Coronavirus is all over the news and people are looking for how-to, actionable information on surviving the pandemic. But limiting advice and actions to improving individual or community hygiene is only washing our hands of the problem. To successfully defeat the looming epidemic, we have to change a health system that places profit over health. We have to recognize and address the political, social and economic factors –the social determinants of health — that govern how health or illness moves through our communities. 

Most of what to do immediately about Coronavirus (or COVID-19) is already known: Wash your hands; don’t touch your face so often; stay home if you are sick. Clean surfaces often that are touched by multiple people. Since the virus is mostly transmitted by respiration, cough or sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask if you are sick or around sick people, or stay about 6 feet away from people you speak with if you think the virus is active in your area. (See our COVID-19 Fact Sheet for more details.)

While individual action is important, it will not stop an epidemic, only collective action will. We have to start acting like the connections among us are not routes to transmit disease, but the channels through which we can defeat it. There are many actions and policies we can demand to lower the possibility that COVID-19 becomes epidemic in the United States:

1) Guaranteed income for people affected by the virus.

Most of us live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to stay home from work without pay. Quarantines are difficult enough for people without making them worse by causing financial disaster.

The federal government has refused to require employers to pay sick leave, and even states that do — California requires only 3 days a year – would not cover the time necessary for your quarantine, much less if your quarantine is because someone else in your household is sick. And how would people with the lowest wages survive, those in service or production jobs who cannot telecommute (as our health advisors so blithely suggest), if their employers shut down?  If schools are closed to prevent disease from spreading, how will adults stay home with children and not lose their jobs or income?

In places like the Bay Area, where housing costs take the lion’s share of monthly expenses, it may also be necessary to declare mortgage holidays and a moratorium on evictions. 

2) Free access to testing and treatment.

The cost of health care already stops people from getting timely testing and treatment for health problems. With coronavirus, our health system is a prescription for an epidemic. 

The CDC bungled producing testing kits for COVID-19, and hospitals still have a shortage. People who have been tested are being charged thousands of dollars. When asked about treatment costs, HHS Secretary Azar refused to say treatment would be affordable: “We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest.”

If the US continues on the health-care–for-profit path, it insures the epidemic will be more widespread and more severe. Free access to testing and treatment for coronavirus is essential, as it is for other health conditions. Demand access to care now and in November don’t vote for anyone who doesn’t support Medicare for All – they’re basically telling you that saving your life is too expensive. 

3) Prioritize reaching the most vulnerable communities

People of color and low-income communities have more exposure to disease and less access to health care facilities. We can’t perpetuate this injustice in our coronavirus response.

People already sick, especially those with breathing problems, have a higher chance of getting severely ill and dying from COVID-19. Environmental racism places factories and freeways disproportionately in poor communities of color, leading, for example, to 20% more asthma among African Americans. By prioritizing reaching communities marginalized by the medical system with necessary supplies, testing and treatment, we can slow the epidemic and begin to undo the deadly relationship of ill health, inequity and injustice. 

These are all achievable demands. To win them, we have to organize pressure on our local, state and national governments from our neighborhood organizations, unions, churches, professional groups, and within the political parties that are contending for our votes this election year. 

We can also organize locally to care for each other:

–Reorient your Neighborhood Watch or Earthquake Preparedness group to check up on your neighbors. Find out who is sick and who needs help.

–Expand the reach of Meals on Wheels and other such programs to feed those in quarantine.

–Volunteer and train others to be community health outreach workers to help answer questions and prepare your neighborhood for the coronavirus.

–Compensate “gig workers” who are the human backbone of food and supplies order and delivery apps for the time and disinfection supplies  they need to safely support people stuck at home in quarantine.

What really stands out in the face of an epidemic like coronavirus is our leaders’ antagonism to the concept of “the public good” — unless it’s profitable, it just shouldn’t exist. Our public health systems have been weakened by millions of dollars of budget cuts, an opposition to regulation of both pollution and greed, and the refusal to build or maintain common infrastructure. If we are going to survive coronavirus with a minimum of deaths, we need to replace our health-for-profit system with one that recognizes that health is a human right.