In a retrospective study of health claims for 618 U.S. counties over 14 years, researchers found that severe drought conditions increased the risk of mortality among adults 65 or over.
“Even with all of this variability, we still observed an association between drought and health effects.” Michelle Bell, a professor at Yale F&ES and senior author of the study, noted, “These findings are critically important given that climate change is anticipated to increase the frequency and severity of droughts.” The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H.
They identified periods of “non-drought” and “full drought,” and periods when droughts were “worsening.” In periods when droughts were worsening, they further broke down the drought days into “low severity” and “high severity.” They then used Medicare claims made between Jan. 1, 2000 and Dec. 31, 2013, to calculate daily rates of cardiovascular admissions, respiratory admissions, and deaths among individuals 65 and over.
But when drought escalated to periods of “high severity worsening” conditions, the researchers found, mortality risk increased by 1.55%.
However, one possibility is that drought changes growing seasons or impacts the allergens that influence respiratory illnesses, said the researchers, noting that dry conditions also trigger more dust and particulate matter in the air.
While further research can examine these different factors, Berman said, the new findings provide an important basis.
“Because this was an initial study, we wanted to capture as wide a picture as we could and not isolate ourselves to a tiny snapshot,” he said.
The good news, Berman said, is that droughts, unlike other extreme weather events, are slow-moving.
“Once we’re able to identify the mechanisms behind these effects, we can intervene before drought reaches that severe stage.
Other researchers included Keita Ebisu, a postdoctoral associate at F&ES, and Roger Peng, a professor of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

CONCACAF Champions League: MLS drought continues, FC Dallas falls in semi.
Soccer Sunday Recap: City-Arsenal, Real & Barca win 1:15 Loading A goal in the 92nd minute from Hirving Lozano saw Pachuca eliminate FC Dallas on Tuesday in the CONCACAF Champions League semifinals, with the Mexican side winning the second leg 3-1 and on aggregate 4-3.
With the team’s tied on aggregate 3-3 with Pachuca up in the second leg 2-1, the match looked headed for extra time.
Here are the highlights: Tough to swallow for FC Dallas.
This is the only avenue North American teams have to making the Club World Cup in December, and never has an MLS club made it after repeated failure in this competition.
Now, some attribute that to the overall quality of Mexican clubs and their players, while some also think the fact that the competition is going on before the MLS season starts is another factor, with some clubs just not physically and mentally prepared.
But the numbers don’t lie.
Since the Champions League era began in 2008, there have been eight editions of the competition and check these stats out: All of them have been won by Mexican clubs Just two MLS teams have made the final (more below) Just once has an American team made the final, which was Real Salt Lake in 2010-11, losing to Monterrey Canada has as many finalists as the U.S. as the Montreal Impact made the final in 2014-15 and lost to America Also, 14 of the 16 finalists in CCL history have been from Mexico.
And we could be in for an all-Mexico final.
On Wednesday at 10 p.m.

To implement the California Water Fix project, the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources must obtain the State Water Board’s approval of petitions to change certain elements of the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project (SWP) water right permits and licenses, including most notably adding new points of diversion.
That part concluded in December; part 2 will address the effects of Water Fix project on Fish and Wildlife, including Delta flow criteria that might be included.
“Keep in mind that the Water Fix process that we’re talking about here is a State Water Resources Control Board process and it’s focused on a water rights concept and that is a change in point of diversion.
It’s just a water conveyance project that needs a change in point of diversion.”
“I do think it is dual conveyance; in fact, if we were to shift all the pumping to the north, then the projects couldn’t meet the water quality control plans and the ag salinity standards in the south Delta would not be met, so I think what it does do is give flexibility.
He reminded that the water quality control plan criteria and the regulatory constraints on the Department aren’t being changed, and in order to meet the Southern Delta water quality criteria that are currently a condition of the state’s water rights permits, they will have to maintain some pumping from the south Delta, because it’s that pumping from the south Delta that artificially draws fresh water into the south Delta and helps to provide for protection of agriculture in that region.
The 2006 Water Quality Control Plan itself indicated that alternative conveyance was part of the solution.
… Water Fix proposes it’s going to operate a certain way, and yet in the drought years, it says we’re not going to operate the way that we said we would and we’re not going to tell you how we’re going to operate.
So things are bad now; this actually is worse.” Stuart Somach then turned to Stephanie Morris and asked if the NEPA/CEQA documents explain project operations, and is it appropriate to look to those documents to understand the deficits the other panelists are talking about?
It probably could happen but it’s not likely to happen nor do I think it would happen because the Department and the Bureau don’t want to take those risks because they have contractual obligations that they have to meet in the following years and more importantly, they have water quality control plan requirements that they have to meet in the following years, so they are much more conservative then Kevin’s modeler would be and frankly, probably my modelers.” “The concept embedded in these materials include realtime operations and adaptive management as part of this, but the question, isn’t there a ‘trust me’ quality to that?” asked Stuart Somach, directing the question to Tripp Mizell.

Gainesville Police Department closed off the street north of the intersection of 13 Street and 16 Avenue for safety as an uprooted tree fell into traffic, bringing a nearby light pole down with it.
@WUFTNews pic.twitter.com/7DSjDYbDkh — Gabriella Nuñez (@gabnun13) April 4, 2017 A portion of the sidewalk remains closed until the uprooted tree is completely cleared, said a police service technician.
@WUFTNews pic.twitter.com/PmzOSGlxEN — Gabriella Nuñez (@gabnun13) April 4, 2017 “I didn’t see it, I heard it,” the Santa Fe nursing student said.
The tree fell onto her car, crushing the vehicle and leaving her in shock, said Jones.
@WUFTNews pic.twitter.com/LVPqaef7y5 — Gabriella Nuñez (@gabnun13) April 4, 2017 Other streets in Gainesville were blocked as well as the storm downed power lines.
Approximately 15,000 people were without power due to the storm, a majority of the power restored by 11:00 a.m., according to GRU spokeswoman Tiffany Small.
A neighborhood on 16th Avenue was also affected by the storm as fallen trees were hanging tangled among power lines leaving six houses without power.
@WUFTNews pic.twitter.com/GvXRMuXEpP — Gabriella Nuñez (@gabnun13) April 4, 2017 Fallen trees and debris are tangled in the power lines keeping them just above the streets.
GRU officials had to cut off interfering branches and restore power lines.
Though the storm brought damages and inconvenience, the rain helped resolve a rainfall deficit — Florida was in the middle of a severe drought.

Terrorist group al-Shabab delivers food relief to drought-stricken Somalia.
The al-Qaida affiliate in East Africa is a brutal force that amputates and executes people, and flogs women in public.
Media reports say the group has formed drought committees for food distributions in six regions under its control and has dug water canals for farmers.
Roman Catholic Bishop Giorgio Bertin, the apostolic administrator of Mogadishu, said he’s not surprised the group is distributing food in areas where the government has not been as responsive.
The United Nations estimated about 6.2 million people in the country were in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
“The indicators are lining up dangerously with what we saw in the lead up to the 2011 famine,” said Victor Moses, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director in Somalia, in a media statement on March 29.
In 2011, al-Shabab attempts to distribute relief went awry, with the U.N. accusing the group of sabotaging relief food distribution after it allegedly attacked convoys, burned food and killed some aid workers.
It is not clear where the group is getting the aid, but its own network of sponsors and sympathizers are believed to be donating.
Protection money and extortion from businessmen and ordinary people are also believed to be funding the relief effort.
Alms in Islam — called “zakat” — is a religious obligation in which Muslims are required to give 2.5 percent of their incomes to the needy.

In a retrospective study of health claims for 618 U.S. counties over 14 years, researchers found that severe drought conditions increased the risk of mortality among adults 65 or over.
They identified periods of periods of "non-drought," "full drought," and periods when droughts were "worsening."
In the case of periods when droughts were worsening, they further broke down the drought days into "low severity" and "high severity."
According to their findings, respiratory admissions decreased by 1.99 percent during full drought periods.
But when drought escalated to periods of "high severity worsening" conditions, the researchers found, mortality risk increased by 1.55 percent.
Dry conditions also trigger more dust and particulate matter in the air.
"Since health risks appear to increase with drought severity, you have time to enact clinical interventions to help avoid some of these adverse health outcomes," he said.
"I am so delighted to have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Yale and the Hopkins teams to conduct such important study," said co-author Francesca Dominici, Professor of Biostatistics and co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
### Other researchers included Keita Ebisu, a postdoctoral associate at F&ES and Roger Peng, a professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public.
are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert!

Bruce Cassidy is coaching a playoff team, one that clinched its fate beyond Game No.
You go to work, try to get the team where it needs to be, do the things that you feel are necessary to continue to get better.
We worked hard all year to secure a spot.
Cassidy did what some coaches might not have done.
Cassidy paired Moore with Bergeron as his lead penalty-killing duo.
Moore played 3:10 of the five-minute kill.
He is aggressive with most of his moves: trying new pairs, changing lines, and doling out shifts to the players who are most deserving.
David Pastrnak gave the Bruins breathing room by burying a Nash feed at 16:06 of the second.
Now our D are able to get up and close their gaps and have the confidence that if they are a little bit off, the goaltender’s able to make the save.” The Bruins are in third place in the division with two games remaining.
I thought we played really well the last 20 or so games.

Researchers use a pair of robotics platforms in hopes of developing drought-resistant crops.
A team of researchers at the University of Missouri are using a pair of robotics platforms and a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a system for identifying crop strains resistant to heat, drought and flood.
The system developed by the team is comprised of two primary robots — a mobile tower that stands watch at the edge of the crop and a roaming ‘bot deployed by the system to take a closer look.
The resulting data includes 3D scans of the plants (corn and sorghum at present), along with temperature, humidity and light intensity readings taken at different heights — each of which tend to vary greatly, due to an increasing tendency to plant crops closer together.
“A flying UAV is a little cumbersome,” he said.
“You have to have a pilot to fly it, you have to have a flight plan that has to be filed.
Each is equipped with a trio of cameras offering up 3D models of the plant along with biomass volume and thermal readings.
At present, the Vinobot has to be piloted, but DeSouza says the team is working on an autonomous version that can automatically gather data in tandem with the tower.
“The idea is to correlate how the plant is developing with the family, so we understand which family is tolerating the stress better than the others and ultimately to identify the gene that makes those families more or less resistant to those stresses,” says DeSouza.
That information can then be used to cross-breed the most resilient plants, in order to create crops that are more resistant to the changing climate.

In just a few years water, oil and money would flow.
Roads, schools and hospitals would follow.
To the south, in Karioreng village, Akalale Esekon tried to breast-feed her infant child, but no milk came so the baby screamed with hunger.
Compounding the drought is population growth in Turkana—at 6.4 percent a year, it is twice the national average—which means already scarce resources are quickly exhausted by people and their livestock.
It is instead the region’s biggest economy and a stable if faulty democracy, but Turkana feels like another country.
"The image of Kenya as a middle income country doesn’t do justice to the reality on the ground," said Werner Schultink, country head for the UN children’s agency, UNICEF.
The hunger is greatest in the north.
Little oil, less water In 2013, Kenya and the UN cultural body, UNESCO, thrilled to announce the discovery of a gigantic aquifer beneath Turkana that promised irrigation and enough water for all.
As the drought bites, the road ahead looks longer than ever for Turkana: some 92 percent of its 1.4 million people live below the poverty line and only a fifth know how to read and write, a figure four times lower than the national average.
"There will be more droughts," said Nakara.

A new Yale-led study reveals a distinct connection between drought exposure and adverse human health among older adults.
In a retrospective study of health claims for 618 U.S. counties over 14 years, researchers found that severe drought conditions increased the risk of mortality among adults 65 or over.
Michelle Bell, Professor at Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and senior author of the study, noted, "These findings are critically important given that climate change is anticipated to increase the frequency and severity of droughts."
The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H.
They identified periods of periods of "non-drought," "full drought," and periods when droughts were "worsening."
According to their findings, respiratory admissions decreased by 1.99 percent during full drought periods.
But when drought escalated to periods of "high severity worsening" conditions, the researchers found, mortality risk increased by 1.55 percent.
Dry conditions also trigger more dust and particulate matter in the air.
While further research can examine these different factors, Berman said, the new findings provide an important basis.
"Since health risks appear to increase with drought severity, you have time to enact clinical interventions to help avoid some of these adverse health outcomes," he said.