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How do you read the EPA’s Air Quality Index?

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MarketWatch: “The EPA says to think of the AQI as a yardstick that runs from 0 to 500. The higher the AQI value, the greater the level of air pollution and the greater the health concern. For example, an AQI value of 50 or below represents good air quality for essentially all the population. A reading above 100 typically means that the outdoor air remains safe for most, but seniors, pregnant people and children are at increased risk. Those with heart and lung disease may also be at greater risk. And an AQI value over 300 represents hazardous air quality that will impact to some degree nearly everyone exposed to the air, even healthy people. Because remembering the severity of number ranges may be challenging, EPA has assigned a color to each range, with green and yellow representing the most favorable conditions, and orange, red, purple and maroon reflective of levels that are progressively worse, topping out at maroon or readings between 301 to 500.For comparison, the record-setting wildfire years of 2020 and 2021 meant that outdoor air near Portland, Ore., on select days produced an AQI above 400…”

Office of Civil Rights Issues Guidance on HIPAA Compliant Use of Meta Pixels

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ABA: “A Meta Pixel is a code embedded in websites that tracks users’ online activities and sends such activities as discrete packets of user data to Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The Meta Pixel can track “users as they navigate through a website, logging which pages they visit, which buttons they click, and certain… Continue Reading

Short Supply – The Health and National Security Risks of Drug Shortages

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U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – Majority Staff Report, Short Supply – The Health and National Security Risks of Drug Shortages – March 2023: “Shortages of critical medications continue to rise—including drugs used in hospital emergency rooms and to treat cancer, prescription medications, and even common over-the-counter treatments like children’s cold… Continue Reading

Former Gun Company Executive Explains Roots of America’s Gun Violence Epidemic

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ProPublica: “From the movie theater to the shopping mall, inside a church and a synagogue, through the grocery aisle and into the classroom, gun violence has invaded every corner of American life. It is a social epidemic no vaccine can stem, a crisis with no apparent end. Visual evidence of the carnage spills with numbing… Continue Reading

Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules

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Mashable: “The first self-described self-help book was published in 1859. The author’s name, improbably, was Samuel Smiles; the title, even more improbably, was Self-Help(opens in a new tab). A distillation of lessons from the lives of famous people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, it sold millions of copies and was a mainstay… Continue Reading

Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% above pre-covid forecasts

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The Economist [free to read at this link] – Attributing this increase to covid would make it the fourth-leading cause of death: “n May 5th the World Health Organisation declared an end to the covid-19 public-health emergency. Based on official mortality counts, this looked tardy. By April 2022, average weekly death tolls had already fallen… Continue Reading

Turning off the Tap: How the world can end plastic pollution and create a circular economy

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UN Environment Programme – Turning off the Tap: How the world can end plastic pollution and create a circular economy – The report proposes a systems change to address the causes of plastic pollution, combining reducing problematic and unnecessary plastic use with a market transformation towards circularity in plastics. This can be achieved by accelerating three… Continue Reading

Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air. Privacy Experts Are Worried

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The New York Times: “Environmental DNA research has aided conservation, but scientists say its ability to glean information about human populations and individuals poses dangers. David Duffy, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Florida, just wanted a better way to track disease in sea turtles. Then he started finding human DNA everywhere he looked.… Continue Reading