Minnesota’s air quality is poor. Here’s how to stay healthy on bad air days.
In the last couple weeks, Minnesota has been visited periodically by a heavy cloud of haze, courtesy of smoke from wildfires up near Canada, borne south on the wind. Since hazy air like this is expected all weekend and into next week MinnPost asked Teddie Potter, director of planetary health at the University of Minnesota’s School of… Read more »
Nearly 800 Line 3 pipeline workers tested positive for COVID-19
A total of 788 workers building Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline through the US state of Minnesota have tested positive for COVID-19, according to data obtained by Al Jazeera from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). In November, more than 200 healthcare workers and Indigenous tribal leaders petitioned Governor Tim Walz to issue an emergency stay… Read more »
Working upstream
Health-care workers often conceptualise addressing the social and structural determinants of health as working upstream. In response to the racial disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Movement for Black Lives, health systems are acknowledging systemic racism, promoting implicit bias training, and screening for the social determinants of health. Although welcome, these changes will not achieve… Read more »
Readers Write: As air quality declines, need for clean cars increases
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) issued an air quality alert last month that air pollution from fine particles would be at dangerous levels for a few days…. Minnesota is having many more of these air-quality-alert days. The alarms are going off for Minnesotans to support the Clean Cars Minnesota rule.
More pandemics? Health division hears how public health and climate change converge
Is the conversation about COVID-19 drowning out discussion of climate change? It may sometimes seem that way, but nine testifiers at a joint meeting Wednesday said issues of public health and climate change go hand in hand.
A huge oil pipeline is coming to Minnesota – and with it the risk of Covid
Advocates and Native tribes, who have fought the proposal for years, have renewed complaints amid a coronavirus surge
Doctors ask governor to halt Enbridge pipeline construction because of COVID-19 concerns
Health professionals and northern Minnesota residents pleaded with Gov. Tim Walz to halt construction of Enbridge’s controversial $2.6 billion oil pipeline, saying the project will draw thousands of out-of-state workers who could accelerate the spread of COVID-19.
Op-ed: Minnesota State Agencies Green Light Line 3 Construction: Compound Climate Crisis with COVID-19 in a Self-Defeating Move
When people ask me, “What got you interested in climate change?”, I often think back to a newspaper cartoon I saw as a child that’s stuck with me since. The cartoon was of a man chopping the branch that he was sitting on. A concept so simple even a child could grasp: our wellbeing as… Read more »
Community Voices: MPCA sidelines science in Line 3 water permitting process
As scientists who have worked in water resources management, geology, ecosystem assessment, energy systems, and public health, we were shocked at how independent science has been largely ignored in the permit review process.
Talking the relation between climate change, COVID-19 and public health with U of M
Vishnu Laalitha Surapaneni, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School and Climate Change and Health champion, explains how health repercussions from the changing climate unequally impact certain Minnesota populations and how the COVID-19 pandemic compounds these health harms.
