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The Association between Dust Storms and Daily Non-Accidental Mortality in the United States, 1993-2005.
Citation:
Crooks, J., W. Cascio, M. Percy, J. Reyes, L. Neas, AND E Hilborn. The Association between Dust Storms and Daily Non-Accidental Mortality in the United States, 1993-2005. ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Research Triangle Park, NC, 124(11):1735-43, (2016).
Impact/Purpose:
Dust storms are relevant to the Agency because they have been shown to have health impacts in the other counties and because they are likely to increase in frequency as a result of anthropogenic climate change. The purpose of our manuscript is to examine the association between dust storms and non-accidental mortality over the entire U.S. and in the two states with the largest number of dust storms, Arizona and California. This work may inform U.S. Global Change Research Program climate/health assessments and may be relevant to policy-making regarding climate change.
Description:
Background:The impact of dust storms on human health has been studied in the context of Asian,Saharan, Arabian, and Australian storms,but there has been no recent population-level epidemiological research on the dust storms in North America . The relevance of dust storms to public health is likely to increase as extreme weather events are predicted to become more frequent with anticipated changes in climate through the 21st century.Objectives: We examined the association between dust storms and county-level non-accidental mortality in the United States from 1993 through 2005.Methods:Dust storm incidence data, including date and approximate location. are taken from the U.S. National Weather Service storm database. County-level mortality data for the years 1993-2005 were acquired from the National Center for Health Statistics. Distributed lag conditionallogistic regression models under a time-stratified case-crossover design were used to study the relationship between dust storms and daily mortality counts over the whole United States and in Arizona and California specifically. End points included total non-accidental mortality and three mortality subgroups (cardiovascular, respiratory, and other non-acc idental).Results: We estimated that for the United States as a whole, total non-accidental mortality increased by 7.4% (95% Cl: 1.6, 13.5; p = 0.011) and 6.7% (95% Cl: 1.1,12.6; p = 0.018) at 2- and 3-day lags, respectively, and by an average of 2.7% (95% Cl: 0.4, 5.1; p = 0.023) over lags 0-5 compared with referent days. Significant associations with non-accidental mortality were estimated for California (lag 2 and 0-5 day) and Arizona (lag 3),for cardiovascular mortality in the United States (lag 2) and Arizona (lag 3), and for other non-accidental mortality in California (lags 1-3 and 0-5).Conclusions: Dust storms are associated with increases in lagged non-accidentaland cardiovascular mortality.
