PI's Media Digest: New bill would close "boyfriend loophole," new research on wildfire smoke, social connection, and park equity
Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Debbie Dingell introduced a bill that would close the “boyfriend loophole” in domestic violence laws, preventing convicted stalkers and abusers from buying or owning guns. “The Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act aims to end what is commonly referred to as the “boyfriend loophole,” which historically has allowed convicted domestic abusers to buy or own firearms. Research shows that access to a gun makes it five times more likely that an abusive partner will kill his female victim. Nearly half of all women killed in the U.S. are murdered by a current or former intimate partner, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. And 76% of women who were murdered by intimate partners were first stalked by that partner. “No person should live in fear of a stalker or abuser with easy access to deadly weapons,” Dingell said in a statement. “Stalking and domestic violence are two of the greatest predictors of future violence, and ignoring those warning signs will lead to preventable murders and deaths.””
NPR reports on the hazards of wildfire smoke. “Tens of millions of Americans experienced at least a day last year shrouded in wildfire smoke. Entire cities were blanketed, in some cases for weeks, as unprecedented wildfires tore across the Western U.S., causing increases in hospitalizations for respiratory emergencies and concerns about people's longer-term health. A new study finds those concerns are well founded. Researchers with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego say that the tiny particles released in wildfire smoke are up to 10 times more harmful to humans than particles released from other sources, such as car exhaust. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications Friday, paints a worrisome picture for Americans living on a fire-prone continent, especially as climate change amplifies fire risk worldwide. "[Air pollution] has been decreasing in some regions of the U.S.," says Rosana Aguilera, a postdoctoral scholar and one of the study's co-authors. "This is not the case in wildfire-prone areas." Aguilera and co-author Tom Corringham looked at hospital admissions data over 14 years in Southern California and compared that to spikes in air pollution during strong wind events. They found that pollutants from wildfire smoke caused up to a 10% increase in hospital admissions. "We're pretty aware of the physical costs of wildfire, in terms of firefighting costs and damage to property," Corringham says, referencing the more than $10 billion lost in damages and efforts to corral California's fires last season. "But there's been a lot of work that has shown that the health impacts due to wildfire smoke are on the same order of magnitude, or possibly even greater, than the direct physical cost."”
Healthy Places By Design released a new report, Socially Connected Communities: Solutions for Social Isolation, which “highlights how social isolation is not a personal choice or individual problem, but one that is rooted in community design, social norms, and systemic injustices. The lessons and recommendations shared in this report are meant to inspire collective action to solve this complex problem. From architects to educators, faith leaders to health providers, local governments to grantmakers—we all can play a part in creating opportunities that build relationships between neighbors, improve trust, and foster an overall sense of community.”
The Nation’s Health interviewed Adrienne Hollis of the Union of Concerned Scientists on climate justice: “I view climate justice as a smaller part of environmental justice. If you could imagine an umbrella — and that would be environmental justice — climate justice, immigration justice, criminal justice and so on fall under that because those are the areas we live, play, pray, work and just carry on our daily lives. When we talk specifically about climate justice, we’re talking about the effect of manmade changes in our environment, like increased greenhouse gases, increased heat and melting glaciers. And how those changes have greater impact on vulnerable communities, communities of color and lower socio-economic communities. People don’t realize that contamination, climate change, water infiltration, rising seas don’t stay contained in the environmental justice community. Just like contamination doesn’t know to stay behind the fence line. If it’s not impacting you now, it will. These communities are hit first and worst. It doesn’t mean they’ll be the only ones impacted. If for no other reason than to save yourself, we’ve got to save each other.”
New research in the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reviews the literature on how green space can reduce health disparities: “Disadvantaged groups worldwide, such as low-income and racially/ethnically minoritized people, experience worse health outcomes than more privileged groups, including wealthier and white people. Such health disparities are a major public health issue in several countries around the world. In this systematic review, we examine whether green space shows stronger associations with physical health for disadvantaged groups than for privileged groups. We hypothesize that disadvantaged groups have stronger protective effects from green space because of their greater dependency on proximate green space, as they tend to lack access to other health-promoting resources. We use the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) method and search five databases (CINAHL, Cochrane, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) to look for articles that examine whether socioeconomic status (SES) or race/ethnicity modify the green space-health associations. Based on this search, we identify 90 articles meeting our inclusion criteria. We find lower-SES people show more beneficial effects than affluent people, particularly when concerning public green spaces/parks rather than green land covers/greenness. Studies in Europe show stronger protective effects for lower-SES people versus higher-SES people than do studies in North America. We find no notable differences in the protective effects of green space between racial/ethnic groups. Collectively, these results suggest green space might be a tool to advance health equity and provide ways forward for urban planners, parks managers, and public health professionals to address health disparities.”