Drought

The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.

Kenya: Severe drought fuels malnutrition, reduces hospital-delivery births in Turkana County Following four successive failed rainy seasons, Kenya is amid the worst drought in 40 years, the UN’s women’s health agency, UNFPA, said on Tuesday, shining a light on 134,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women who are reported to be acutely malnourished and in need of treatment. UN News

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The drought crisis is not only affecting women’s access to essential maternal health care; it is causing serious undernutrition among pregnant women, escalating risks to them and their future babies.

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A new tool puts health disparity data in the public’s hands A new tool called the Health Equity Tracker collects, analyzes, and makes visible data on health disparities entrenched in U.S. medicine. Katie Palmer STAT

Over and over, the pandemic has reinforced the reality of racial disparities in the U.S. health system. But that story remains difficult to see in the data, which is still inconsistently collected and reported across the country.