mental health scientist at Columbia’s Joseph L. Mailman School of
Public Health. Kinney points out the well-established connection
between air pollution, temperature, and rates of hospitalization and
death. “What is new, is seeing how it all relates to climate change,” he
says, adding that raising the temperature in urban areas like New York,
where there is limited vegetation to reflect heat and lots of concrete to
absorb it, exacerbates health problems.
According to a 1996 American Meteorological Society report, an
average of three hundred people a year die of heat stress in New York
City. And there’s a socioeconomic factor, too, explains Kinney: “Poor
people, and especially elderly poor people, are most vulnerable to heat
stress.”
THEVIRUSSPECTER
Heat stress is probably the most obvious thing people think of when
the subject of global warming comes up. Other effects are more subtle,
but no less deadly. Higher rates of ground-level ozone are a major res-
piratory irritant, and vector-borne diseases thrive in warmer tempera-
tures. And that is the problem that is keeping the city’s public health
officials up nights.
New York City had never had a case of West Nile encephalitis
before 1999, but that hot summer—the hottest and driest in a cen-
tury—sixty-two cases were reported in the region, and seven people
died.
Tests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta
and Fort Collins, Colorado, revealed that the illness was close to the St.
Louis strain of encephalitis, which had never been previously reported
in New York City. By September 6, there were five confirmed victims
of the new virus and thirty-four suspected cases. By September 9,
exotic birds began dying in the Bronx Zoo. A general health warning
was issued, and city residents began to get used to helicopters overhead
spraying clouds of malathion and pyrethriod pesticides. By September
21, scientists had isolated and identified the specific virus, not St. Louis
encephalitis but West Nile.
West Nile is spread by a mosquito, Culex pipens, which breeds in
Greater New York 45