#covid 19 pakistan
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And now for something different. Covid-19 update for Pakistan.
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Pakistan ill-prepared to tackle new Covid 19 variant's arrival: Report
Pakistan ill-prepared to tackle new Covid 19 variant’s arrival: Report
According to media reports, the health authorities of Pakistan aren’t yet prepared to stop the arrival of the new coronavirus variant in the country.
Pakistan seems to be not prepared to combat the new variant of coronavirus. (Representative Image)
By Press Trust of India: Pakistan’s health authorities appear to be ill-prepared to stop the arrival of the new coronavirus variant in the country,…
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#arrival#Covid#Covid 19 variant&x27;s arrival#illprepared#National Command and Operation Centre#Pakistan#Report#tackle#vaccination#variants
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Asma Jahangir Conference, Pakistan-India cross-border collaborative reporting, a cautionary tale from Sri Lanka, and a Bhutan peace initiative
Asma Jahangir Conference, Pakistan-India cross-border collaborative reporting, a cautionary tale from Sri Lanka, and a Bhutan peace initiative
Justice Qazi Faez Isa, late Asma Jahangir, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Manzoor Pashteen: Collage by The Friday Times/Naya Daur
Sharing four recent offerings from Sapan News Network – the most recent one in full below, pegged on the Fourth Asma Jahangir Conference in Lahore, on the ‘ ‘Crisis of Constitutionalism in South Asia’, that I’m thrilled to have co-authored by aspiring young journalist…
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#Afghanistan#AJCONF2022#AliWazir#AsmaJahangir#Democracy#EnforcedDisappearances#ExtrajudicialKilling#GirlsEducation#HumanRights#Journalism#ManzoorPashteen#MediaFreedom#Pakistan#PakistanArmy#PakistanFloods#SouthAsia#Covid-19 pandemic#cpj#Daniel Bastard#Manzoor Pashteen FIR#PTM#RSF#Steve Butler detained#VoicePk.net
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New Workplace buzzword - Quiet Quitting!
New Workplace buzzword – Quiet Quitting!
I have been hearing the term “quiet quitting” over the last several weeks and pretty sure you all have been too. Quiet quitting is taking over TikTok, and the app is ablaze with the term. The term is becoming the new workplace buzzword, mostly among remote Gen Z and younger millennials, which does not mean that you are outright quitting your job but instead you are quitting the idea of going…
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#Blogging#burnout#Buzzword#COVID-19#Gen Z#Karachi#Kinnzayyy#Millennials#Pakistan#Quiet Quitting#TikTok#Women Who Write#work-life imbalance#workforce#Writer&039;s Community
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ফের করোনা আক্রান্ত রাহুল দ্রাবিড়, এশিয়া কাপে তাঁর উপস্থিতি অনিশ্চিত
ফের করোনা (COVID-19) আক্রান্ত রাহুল দ্রাবিড় (Rahul Dravid)। এক সংবাদমাধ্যম সূত্রে জানা গিয়েছে, ভারতীয় দলের কোচ রাহুল দ্রাবিড় করোনা আক্রান্ত হয়েছেন। সামনেই এশিয়া কাপ (Asia Cup)। কিন্তু এশিয়া কাপের পূর্বে ভারতের জন্য দুঃসংবাদ। তিনি করোনা আক্রান্ত হওয়ার ফলে এশিয়া কাপে তাঁর দলে থাকা নিয়ে অনিশ্চয়তা তৈরি হয়েছে।
এই কারণে এশিয়া কাপে টিম ইন্ডিয়ার কোচ হয়ে যাওয়া হয়তো সম্ভব নয়। তবে এখনও পর্যন্ত বোর্ডের তরফে…
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पाकिस्तान में कोरोना के मामलों में उछाल, घरेलू उड़ानों में अनिवार्य किया गया मास्क
पाकिस्तान में कोरोना के मामलों में उछाल, घरेलू उड़ानों में अनिवार्य किया गया मास्क
Covid-19 in Pakistan: पाकिस्तान (Pakistan) में COVID-19 मामलों में एक नया उछाल दिख रहा है, जिसके चलते देश के नागरिक उड्डयन प्राधिकरण (CAA) ने भी तत्काल प्रभाव से घरेलू उड़ानों (Domestic Flights) के लिए मास्क (Mask) फिर से अनिवार्य कर दिया है. सीएए की एक अधिसूचना (Notification) के अनुसार, सभी संबंधित विभागों को नए आदेश का अनुपालन सुनिश्चित करना चाहिए. अधिसूचना में कहा गया है कि घरेलू हवाई यात्रा…
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#Coronavirus#COVID-19#flights#Karachi#mask#Pakistan#उड़ानें#कराची#कोरोना वायरस#कोविड-19#पाकिस्तान#मास्क
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I just want to take a moment and talk about vaccines.
Not the vaccine controversy. Not the Covid-19 vaccine. Just... vaccines.
The basic concept of them is wild to begin with!
Someone noticed that people who got one disease became immune to another, more dangerous one. They learned that this was connected to why some diseases can only strike a person once, that the body has a system of striking down invaders once it knows them well enough to recognize their shape. And then they took that concept and were able to apply it to some small fraction of a disease, something that is not nearly strong enough to actually hurt a person but has the same shape of the illness it's modeled after, and turned it into something you inject directly into the body. And now your body knows that disease's shape. And now you're immune to it. Perhaps forever.
And we've used that concept to do a lot in the way of promoting public health.
You're probably aware of smallpox being eradicated. But think about it again. A vicious disease that preyed upon humanity for millennia, killed untold millions, caused plague after plague. Gone forever. At this point, many of us don't even have the scars from its eradication--but some do. Some still have a scar on their body that acts as proof that they are old enough to know of smallpox, and young enough to have been part of the campaign that destroyed it.
But did you know smallpox wasn't the only disease eradicated by vaccination?
Rinderpest doesn't get as much press, likely because it never affected humans directly, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a scourge in its own right. It killed cattle in a week or two after the first symptoms, causing them a painful, unpleasant death--and it almost always did end in death, in the end, with a mortality rate second perhaps only to rabies. And if the suffering of the cattle weren't enough, think of the cattle farmers who could only stand by and watch as their herds were ravaged by this plague, as it spread from beast to beast until there were no survivors, and the animals that they had poured so much time, energy, and attention into were nothing but diseased, rotting flesh.
And rinderpest, too, was eradicated by a worldwide vaccination campaign. Nobody ever has to worry about it anymore. Rinderpest is gone forever, just like smallpox.
We're not far off with polio, either. You probably know the old stories of polio as a threat, of children afraid to swim in pools with other children, of whole wards of hospital patients within iron lungs for their entire lives. But the vast majority of people reading this post know that only through those old stories, not through lived experience.
There are only two countries now where wild polio remains endemic. ("Wild polio" is here used to differentiate it from polio as a complication of use of the live vaccine, which does happen, unfortunately.) Those countries are Afghanistan and Pakistan, for which the reasons behind the eradication campaign's delayed success are, sadly, all too obvious. But even in those war-torn countries, a total of twelve (12) cases of polio were reported in 2023. That's a far cry from the days where it was a threat looming in every neighborhood.
We could eradicate polio in the coming years, too. We're not far off. It's been complicated by politics and logistics, but we've already overcome a lot of the same. Soon, polio might become just another historical footnote.
All because one scientist noticed that the milkmaids who got cowpox never seemed to get ill during smallpox epidemics. And all because humanity as a whole banded together and campaigned to eradicate diseases for good with this new knowledge.
It's not just polio, either. If we all worked together, we might be able to eradicate measles, mumps, rubella... it'll never be all diseases, not even close--some mutate too fast, others have too many wild animal hosts--but with a bit of a push we can take a few more of those diseases that ruined countless lives across human history and turn them into a historical footnote and curiosity, names that once inspired terror becoming merely quaint and old-fashioned.
Isn't that a wonderful thought?
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what i read in august 2022:
(previous editions) bold = favourite
class, race, & labour
white fantasy appropriates stories of oppression from people of colour
behind the smiles at amazon
“no one cares about africans” (ukraine)
looking for clarence thomas (us)
time for new dreams: lessons from techno-orientalism and afro-futurism
gender & sexuality
k-beauty's sexual wellness wave is not what it seems
australia’s porn problem
welcome to the monkey house (s korea)
politics & current affairs
'everything is destroyed': pakistan flood survivors plead for aid
global banks defy us crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists
how kyrgyzstan is losing its transparency
‘they robbed me of my children’: yemen’s war victims tell their stories
history, culture, & media
the great regression: a history of kidults from hello kitty to disney weddings
the us military’s long history of anti-asian dehumanisation
black king of songs: why the people’s republic of china embraced paul robeson
the covid-19 pandemic changed what it means to have a ‘good death’
#studyblr#studyspo#academia#university#productivity#reading list#reading lists#student#studying#uniblr#academia aesthetic#dark academia#myresources
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The strangest and main events that happened in 2022
The British Queen Elizabeth II died
Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.
The number of COVID-19 cases exceeded 300 million worldwide
The first successful heart transplant from a pig to a human patient occurred
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
An outbreak of monkeypox begins when the first monkeypox virus case is reported in London, the United Kingdom.
A large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai, a submarine volcano in Tonga, triggered tsunami warnings in Australia, Canada, Chile, Fiji, Japan, New Zealand, Samoa, and the United States.
A number of large black holes lurking in dwarf galaxies that have previously been overlooked by astronomers were discovered. Our own Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole has been recently discovered by newly discovered black holes.
The UK goes through 3 prime minsters
A series of severe heatwaves from July to August hit Europe, causing at least 53,000 deaths and additionally causing major wildfires, travel disruption, and record high temperatures in many countries
Pakistan declares a "climate catastrophe" and appeals for international assistance, as the death toll from recent flooding in the country exceeds 1,000, the world's deadliest flood since 2017.
A fatal human crush occurs during an association football match at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang Regency, East Java, Indonesia, killing 131 people and injuring more than 500
A Hypatia stone from an extra-terrestrial planet could be the first tangible sign of an explosion of type Ia supernova. Among the universe’s most energetic events are these rare supernovas. It is possible that Hypatia is a “forensic” clue from the early formation of our solar system of a cosmic story that spans millions of years.
Those approaching Gatwick Airport were confused after a prankster erected a sign reading “Welcome to Luton.” Air passengers arriving at the UK’s second-largest airport, which is located just over 30 miles south of central London, can make out the 60m (197ft) sign.
A recently developed artificial skin system closely resembles human skin. The system uses electronic signals to sense temperature, humidity, and pressure simultaneously. This is leaning towards more intelligent prostheses being created and also more sensitive robots.
Elon Musk completes his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
At least 156 people are killed and another 152 injured in a crowd crush during Halloween festivities in Seoul, South Korea.
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The strangest and main events that happened in 2022
The British Queen Elizabeth II died
Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.
The number of COVID-19 cases exceeded 300 million worldwide
The first successful heart transplant from a pig to a human patient occurred
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
An outbreak of monkeypox begins when the first monkeypox virus case is reported in London, the United Kingdom.
A large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai, a submarine volcano in Tonga, triggered tsunami warnings in Australia, Canada, Chile, Fiji, Japan, New Zealand, Samoa, and the United States.
A number of large black holes lurking in dwarf galaxies that have previously been overlooked by astronomers were discovered. Our own Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole has been recently discovered by newly discovered black holes.
The UK goes through 3 prime minsters
A series of severe heatwaves from July to August hit Europe, causing at least 53,000 deaths and additionally causing major wildfires, travel disruption, and record high temperatures in many countries
Pakistan declares a "climate catastrophe" and appeals for international assistance, as the death toll from recent flooding in the country exceeds 1,000, the world's deadliest flood since 2017.
A fatal human crush occurs during an association football match at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang Regency, East Java, Indonesia, killing 131 people and injuring more than 500
A Hypatia stone from an extra-terrestrial planet could be the first tangible sign of an explosion of type Ia supernova. Among the universe’s most energetic events are these rare supernovas. It is possible that Hypatia is a “forensic” clue from the early formation of our solar system of a cosmic story that spans millions of years.
Those approaching Gatwick Airport were confused after a prankster erected a sign reading “Welcome to Luton.” Air passengers arriving at the UK’s second-largest airport, which is located just over 30 miles south of central London, can make out the 60m (197ft) sign.
A recently developed artificial skin system closely resembles human skin. The system uses electronic signals to sense temperature, humidity, and pressure simultaneously. This is leaning towards more intelligent prostheses being created and also more sensitive robots.
Elon Musk completes his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
At least 156 people are killed and another 152 injured in a crowd crush during Halloween festivities in Seoul, South Korea.
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A speech by HRH The Duchess of Cornwall at a Violence Against Women and Girls Event at the Kigali Convention Centre, Rwanda
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a huge pleasure to be here with you today. I should, first, like to thank the people of Rwanda for the wonderful welcome that my husband and I have received. I have heard the saying, “God spends the day elsewhere, but he always spends the night in Rwanda” – and, having seen a little of this beautiful country and experienced your hospitality, I can quite understand why that might be the case… Thank you for your kindness and generosity to us and to the whole Commonwealth family – we were all so sorry not to be able to gather here over the past two years and are delighted that we are now, finally, together.
Yesterday, my husband and I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial: the final resting place for more than a quarter of a million men, women and children. Our guide, who had lost both his parents in the Genocide against the Tutsi, spoke to us of how, in the wake of those appalling, unfathomable events, the people of Rwanda have embraced peace and reconciliation. And he described, with gentleness and humility, how we all have a personal responsibility to fight the discrimination and ideologies that lead to the destruction of others. It is in that same spirit of encouraging personal responsibility that I wish to speak today about a different evil that has led to the death of many thousands: violence against women and girls.
The figures are shocking. Globally, nearly 1 in 3 women have been abused in their lifetime. In times of crisis, the numbers rise, as they have, dramatically, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Across the Commonwealth, calls to domestic violence helplines have increased by up to 500% over the past two years. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all know someone who has endured sexual or domestic abuse. We can, therefore, all be part of combatting these heinous acts.
On International Women’s Day earlier this year, I was profoundly touched by President Kagame’s powerful message on social media, which read, “Equality is a right, not a favour”. We know that Rwanda is ranked 7th in the world in terms of women’s rights and opportunities. So let us bear His Excellency’s words in mind as we focus on violence in the home against women and girls today and remember that we are seeking rights, not favours.
We are seeking rights that have been denied to women and girls in every part of the world: Joanna Simpson in the UK, beaten to death by her husband while their two small children were in the next room; Noreen in Pakistan, whose husband, a drug addict, routinely abused her and alternately threw her out of the house or forbade her to go outside; and Uwaila Vera Omozuwa, murdered in Nigeria as she studied in church.
These stories are heart-breaking. But, given the statistics I have just quoted, they are, sadly, not unusual.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here with one purpose - to find solutions. It is surely significant that every single member state has unanimously agreed to support the “Commonwealth Says NO MORE” campaign and to implement initiatives to prevent domestic violence and sexual abuse.
There is power in this alliance. In the strength of our unity, we, the women and men of the Commonwealth, stand with victims and survivors, who, despite the temptation to hide away in silence, speak up so that others know they aren’t alone – whether in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Pacific or the Caribbean and Americas. In so doing, we have the opportunity to end gender-based violence and those laws and practices that discriminate against women. And each one of us must take personal responsibility not to let this opportunity be lost.
I should like to close by quoting from a speech given 75 years ago by my mother-in-law, The Queen, in Cape Town. As we work together, let us be inspired by Her Majesty’s words, her example and her deep love for the Commonwealth, which, in 2009, Rwanda joined as a new partner and friend.
"If we all go forward together with an unwavering faith, a high courage, and a quiet heart, we shall be able to make of this ancient Commonwealth, which we all love so dearly, an even grander thing - more free, more prosperous, more happy and a more powerful influence for good in the world."
Thank you.
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Imran Khan Warns That Pakistan’s Election Could Be A Farce
His Party is Being Unfairly Muzzled, the Former Prime Minister Writes From Prison
— January 4th, 2024 | The Economist
Imran Khan, Former Prime Minister of Pakistan. Image: Dan Williams
Today pakistan is being ruled by caretaker governments at both the federal level and provincial level. These administrations are constitutionally illegal because elections were not held within 90 days of parliamentary assemblies being dissolved.
The public is hearing that elections will supposedly be held on February 8th. But having been denied the same in two provinces, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, over the past year—despite a Supreme Court order last March that those votes should be held within three months—they are right to be sceptical about whether the national vote will take place.
The country’s election commission has been tainted by its bizarre actions. Not only has it defied the top court but it has also rejected my Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (pti) party’s nominations for first-choice candidates, hindered the party’s internal elections and launched contempt cases against me and other pti leaders for simply criticising the commission.
Whether elections happen or not, the manner in which I and my party have been targeted since a farcical vote of no confidence in April 2022 has made one thing clear: the establishment—the army, security agencies and the civil bureaucracy—is not prepared to provide any playing field at all, let alone a level one, for pti.
It was, after all, the establishment that engineered our removal from government under pressure from America, which was becoming agitated with my push for an independent foreign policy and my refusal to provide bases for its armed forces. I was categorical that we would be a friend to all but would not be anyone’s proxy for wars. I did not come to this view lightly. It was shaped by the huge losses Pakistan had incurred collaborating with America’s “war on terror”, not least the 80,000 Pakistani lives lost.
In March 2022 an official from America’s State Department met Pakistan’s then ambassador in Washington, dc. After that meeting the ambassador sent a cipher message to my government. I later saw the message, via the then foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and it was subsequently read out in cabinet.
In view of what the cipher message said, I believe that the American official’s message was to the effect of: pull the plug on Imran Khan’s prime ministership through a vote of no confidence, or else. Within weeks our government was toppled and I discovered that Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, had, through the security agencies, been working on our allies and parliamentary backbenchers for several months to move against us.
People flocked onto the streets to protest against this regime change, and in the next few months pti won 28 out of 37 by-elections and held massive rallies across the country, sending a clear message as to where the public stood. These rallies attracted a level of female participation that we believe was unprecedented in Pakistan’s history. This unnerved the powers that had engineered our government’s removal.
To add to their panic, the administration that replaced us destroyed the economy, bringing about unprecedented inflation and a currency devaluation within 18 months. The contrast was clear for everyone to see: the pti government had not only saved Pakistan from bankruptcy but also won international praise for its handling of the covid-19 pandemic. In addition, despite a spike in commodity prices, we steered the economy to real gdp growth of 5.8% in 2021 and 6.1% in 2022.
Unfortunately, the establishment had decided I could not be allowed to return to power, so all means of removing me from the political landscape were used. There were two assassination attempts on my life. My party’s leaders, workers and social-media activists, along with supportive journalists, were abducted, incarcerated, tortured and pressured to leave pti. Many of them remain locked up, with new charges being thrown at them every time the courts give them bail or set them free. Worse, the current government has gone out of its way to terrorise and intimidate pti’s female leaders and workers in an effort to discourage women from participating in politics.
I face almost 200 legal cases and have been denied a normal trial in an open court. A false-flag operation on May 9th 2023—involving, among other things, arson at military installations falsely blamed on pti—led to several thousand arrests, abductions and criminal charges within 48 hours. The speed showed it was pre-planned.
This was followed by many of our leaders being tortured or their families threatened into giving press conferences and engineered television interviews to state that they were leaving the party. Some were compelled to join other, newly created political parties. Others were made to give false testimony against me under duress.
Despite all this, pti remains popular, with 66% support in a Pattan-Coalition 38 poll held in December; my personal approval rating is even higher. Now the election commission, desperate to deny the party the right to contest elections, is indulging in all manner of unlawful tricks. The courts seem to be losing credibility daily.
Meanwhile, a former prime minister with a conviction for corruption, Nawaz Sharif, has returned from Britain, where he was living as an absconder from Pakistani justice. In November a Pakistani court overturned the conviction (Under United States’ Scrotums Licker Corrupt Army Generals’ Directions).
It is my belief that Corrupt to his Core Mr Sharif has struck a deal with the establishment whereby it will support his acquittal and throw its weight behind him in the upcoming elections. But so far the public has been unrelenting in its support for pti and its rejection of the “selected”.
It is under these circumstances that elections may be held on February 8th. All parties are being allowed to campaign freely except for pti. I remain incarcerated, in solitary confinement, on absurd charges that include treason. Those few of our party’s leaders who remain free and not underground are not allowed to hold even local worker conventions. Where pti workers manage to gather together they face brutal police action.
In this scenario, even if elections were held they would be a disaster and a farce, since pti is being denied its basic right to campaign. Such a joke of an election would only lead to further political instability. This, in turn, would further aggravate an already volatile economy.
The only viable way forward for Pakistan is fair and free elections, which would bring back political stability and rule of law, as well as ushering in desperately needed reforms by a democratic government with a popular mandate. There is no other way for Pakistan to disentangle itself from the crises confronting it. Unfortunately, with democracy under siege, we are heading in the opposite direction on all these fronts. ■
— Imran Khan is the Founder and Former Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and was Prime Minister of Pakistan from 2018 to 2022.
— Editor’s Note: Pakistan’s government and America’s State Department deny Mr Khan’s allegations of American interference in Pakistani politics (Bullshit! Hegemonic War Criminal Conspirator United States and Corrupt Army Generals and Politicians of Pakistan Were Clearly Involved. It’s Social Media’s Modern Era, Not 1970). The government is prosecuting him under the Official Secrets Act.
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I posted 19,872 times in 2022
262 posts created (1%)
19,610 posts reblogged (99%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@gunsandfireandshit
@garlic-bready
@plum-soup
@coolyo294
@hotvampireadjacent
I tagged 1,401 of my posts in 2022
#white woman wednesday - 85 posts
#personal - 45 posts
#cooking - 34 posts
#archive - 24 posts
#fav - 16 posts
#prev tags - 14 posts
#bohun - 14 posts
#me - 13 posts
#jesus christ - 11 posts
#about me - 10 posts
Longest Tag: 139 characters
#like it’s not surprising for nations that aren’t expecting war like chile but pakistan who’s ready to invade kashmir given the opportunity?
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
5,851 notes - Posted October 2, 2022
#4
6,946 notes - Posted October 4, 2022
#3
See the full post
7,088 notes - Posted February 20, 2022
#2
7,778 notes - Posted June 6, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Apparently this lego goat is one of the rarest Lego pieces because it was only ever released in one set, a mill raid in the kingdom line:
The mold has since been destroyed, so look at the pieces now:
See the full post
14,604 notes - Posted April 18, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
#tumblr2022#year in review#my 2022 tumblr year in review#i haven't the fucking faintest what my longest tag was about lmfao
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How Dust Affects the World’s Health Doctors and public health experts agree that breathing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) can be harmful to human health. The airborne particles—thirty times smaller than the width of human hair—can pass easily into the lungs and bloodstream, where they can increase a person’s risk of dying from heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. However, current estimates of the total number of premature deaths linked to PM2.5 range widely, from 3 to 9 million people each year. And there has long been uncertainty about the proportion of these deaths that are due to naturally occurring windblown dust versus human-caused (or anthropogenic) pollution, which comes from factories, transportation, power plants, cookstoves, crop fires, and other sources. Research led by a team of atmospheric scientists based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center indicates that the health burden associated with PM2.5 is somewhat lower than previous estimates suggest—and sheds light on the role of dust. The researchers—including Hongbin Yu and Alexander Yang—calculated the global health effects of PM2.5 by analyzing exposure over an extended period of time using a NASA atmospheric modeling system integrated with medical data from the Univeristy of Washington’s Global Burden of Disease Study. The NASA team’s conclusion: exposure to PM2.5 likely contributed to 2.89 million premature deaths in 2019—1.19 million from heart disease, 1.01 million from stroke, 287,000 from COPD, 230,000 from lower respiratory infection, and 166,000 from lung cancer. According to their estimates, roughly 43 percent of those deaths occurred in China and 23 percent in India—two of the most populous and polluted countries in the world. Other countries with significant exposure to PM2.5 and large numbers of premature deaths included Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria—though none of these countries accounted for more than three percent of the total deaths linked to PM2.5. The analysis linked 22 percent of the premature deaths associated with PM2.5 to dust—much of this in a “dust belt” that spans from West Africa to East Asia. “In both northern China and northern India, you have huge urban populations living downwind of major dust sources,” explained Yu. “You also have this in West Africa and the Middle East to some degree, especially in Nigeria and Egypt.” The top satellite image above shows a wall of dust from the Gobi Desert approaching northeastern China and the Beijing metropolitan area on March 10, 2023. The image below shows dust from the Thar Desert blowing east over the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plain and mixing with smoke and haze from crop fires and urban pollution on April 7, 2021. Both images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. “This study is a reminder that dust—something that is largely natural and something that we can’t easily control with policy—can have an important impact,” said Yu. “In some countries in the dust belt, dust alone can push a population’s PM2.5 exposure well above World Health Organization guidelines.” The team reached their conclusions by first calculating how much background exposure people in different parts of the world had to PM2.5 in 2019 by using a meteorological and atmospheric reanalysis system called the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). MERRA-2 is a model that uses real-world observations to help simulate how dust and other key aerosol particles move and change in the atmosphere over time. The researchers verified the accuracy of MERRA-2’s results by comparing them to air quality measurements collected from the surface at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. They analyzed PM2.5 exposure in 2019 to ensure that any changes in mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic did not influence the results. There are multiple ways researchers can represent the size and shape of dust particles in MERRA-2 and other atmospheric models, and the research team found that estimates of PM2.5 deaths are more accurate if calculations are based on the aerodynamic size of dust particles rather than the geometric size. “Aerodynamic size incorporates important information about the shape and density of dust particles that is relevant to how readily the particles fall out of the atmosphere and move into the respiratory system,” explained Yu. Though the geometric size for dust—which is larger than the aerodynamic size—is commonly used by atmospheric scientists, doing so in this type of health outcome research would lead to an overestimation in the number of deaths attributable to dust by about 1 million people, according to Yu. Key sources of satellite data that were used to constrain MERRA-2 include the MODIS and Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) sensors on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. MERRA-2 covers the modern satellite era (1979 to present) and runs using the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model. In GEOS, airborne particles are simulated using the Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.
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