How long are the boards and beyond videos
It can exacerbate heart diseases, trigger hypertension and compromise immune systems. Greater exposure to air pollution has long been tied to shorter life expectancy.
#HOW LONG ARE THE BOARDS AND BEYOND VIDEOS HOW TO#
How to address the coronavirus’s outsized toll on people of colourīlack and minority ethnic populations are also more likely to live in neighbourhoods where they are exposed to high levels of lead and to air pollution. Black and minority ethnic people are also more likely to live in ‘deprived’ areas that are closer to sources of industrial pollution - from lead-tainted water in Flint, Michigan, to nerve gas, arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls in Anniston, Alabama. Only 2% of white people in the United Kingdom live in crowded conditions, but 30% of Bangladeshi, 16% of Pakistani and 15% of black African households are overcrowded. Crowded housing and working conditions have been suggested as a reason for the disparity. The first ten physicians in the United Kingdom known to have died from COVID-19 were also from black, Asian or minority ethnic groups. In April, the UK Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre estimated that 35% of people in intensive care with COVID-19 are black, Asian or members of other minority ethnic groups, nearly triple their proportion in the UK population. This is not only a problem in the United States. All this creates physical and social vulnerabilities that leave people of colour less able to resist and survive infections such as the coronavirus. It’s also true that marginalized minority ethnic groups have increased exposure to environmental pollution and reduced access to health care. It’s true that pathogens are democratic by nature. By anticipating the outsized environmental assaults that people of colour face, we can act to protect lives during the current pandemic and future outbreaks. To combat these, society must actively take responsibility. The main culprits include indifference and ignorance, inadequate testing of industrial chemicals, racism, housing discrimination, corporate greed and lax legislation from, in the United States, a weakened Environmental Protection Agency. These can persist even in the absence of malevolent actors. We need to take a longer, harder look at environmental racism - systems that produce and perpetuate inequalities in exposure to environmental pollutants.
The disparity exists across both urban and rural areas. African Americans who earn US$50,000–60,000 annually - solidly middle class - are exposed to much higher levels of industrial chemicals, air pollution and poisonous heavy metals, as well as pathogens, than are profoundly poor white people with annual incomes of $10,000. But racial disparities in exposure to environmental pollutants are greater factors that remain even after controlling for income.
Poverty is a risk factor for becoming unwell. Surely, I was asked, the issue is not race, but poverty? When my book on environmental racism came out last year, one of the most common questions I received concerned alternative explanations for the greater ill health of minority ethnic groups. As data accumulate that, in some places, people of colour are much more likely than white people to become ill and die of COVID-19, more discussions are grasping at factors beyond race to explain why.