Beating the heat, for your health

7/22/2018 Protecting Your Health During the Hot Days of Summer | Healthiest Communities | US News
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CIVIC
Children cool themselves in water sprayed from a re truck on Independence Day in Washington, D.C. (ALEX
WONG/GETTY IMAGES)
HEALTHIEST COMMUNITIES
Beating the Heat, for Your Health
As hot temperatures hit the U.S., a public health o cial talks climate change and taking care of
yourself during the dog days of summer.
By Katelyn Newman Staff Writer
July 6, 2018, at 9:35 a.m.

THE MONTH OF JULY started off hotter than blue blazes across the U.S., with more than
113 million Americans under heat warnings or advisories and wild res in the West
forcing thousands to evacuate their homes in dry regions of California, Colorado and
Utah.
Such conditions aren't surprising in a world coping with global warming. But Robin
Pfohman, manager of the Community Resilience and Equity program for Seattle and King
County's public health agency, says while people tend to think of climate change and
extreme heat in terms of melting ice and polar bears or whether they can ski in the
summer, they "don't really realize that climate change is a real threat to us as human
beings."
Robin Pfohman, manager of the
Community Resilience and Equity
program for Seattle & King County
Public Health (COURTESY OF
ROBIN PFOHMAN)
"It's really human health impacts, I think, that are going to connect and compel people to
change their actions or to take this issue more seriously," Pfohman says. "I think we're
making good progress around putting people rst and health rst, and centering climate
change ... on equity and health."
Pfohman and her team have been working at the local level to help people understand
and beat the heat for their health, as events like heat waves, severe droughts and

wild res look likely to be more common in the years ahead.
Pfohman spoke to U.S. News this week about extreme heat, climate change and public
health, as well as how best to take care of yourself during the dog days of summer. The
interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Last summer, your department came out with a series of comics focused on heat-
related illness, discussing both its causes and ways to prevent it. Could you tell me
about the Seattle/King County effort focused on preventing heat-related illness?
It was a two-part project. I initially partnered with the city of Seattle's O ce of
Sustainability and Environment on a research project to better understand heat, heat-
coping mechanisms and how different communities respond to heat events. They chose
the Chinatown-International District and Rainier Valley, which includes communities of
color where equity is an ongoing issue and health disparities exist widely. With our
partner, Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, we did several interviews across those two
communities and also held two focus groups with the broader community that really
focused on coping mechanisms for extreme heat, an understanding of heat-related
illness and some questions about air pollution as well.
We also knew that we did not have good heat-related information in a variety of
languages. We had actually, as part of our project working in Chinatown, we took the
CDC brochure – I think it's called "Beat the Heat" – and translated it into Chinese and
Vietnamese because the CDC did not have translated versions available. And we used
that for one summer, but the next summer we used the ndings that we had collected
from the interviews and partnered with University of Washington researcher Tania Busch

Isaksen to develop the comic zine, which featured the types of folks that we interviewed
but then also some of the coping mechanisms they used. So that was cool, and it was
well-received.
Why the comic route for heat-illness education?
Comics have been a great medium for us to use to communicate. People don't love
preparedness as a topic – especially emergency preparedness as a topic – but to tell a
story in a way that features people that you can maybe relate to, that also features
people from the community like we did, I think it's more readable. And then from a
translation perspective, we were able to translate the comic zine into 12 different
languages, and I think it's much more compelling and approachable than the usual
printouts of a one-pager off the internet that doesn't feature pictures or people that look
like people in the community.
Which populations are most at risk?
Especially elderly, children, outdoor workers. There are people at disproportionate risk for
heat stroke or heat exhaustion that we de nitely tried to feature in the comic zine,
particularly people who already have chronic illness, face health disparities or face
health inequity on a daily basis. We know that those groups are disproportionately
impacted by any kind of emergency, whether or not it's heat, climate change-related or
ooding.
I think that one of our challenges here locally is that people might not think 90 or 92
degrees is that hot on one hand, but we also don't have air conditioning – that's not

widely accepted, we just don't have it, because extreme temperatures haven't risen to
that high of a degree. So people often might not take precautions because they might
not have the capacity to cool themselves down and then are not thinking that it's so hot
that they're at risk.
People seem to be pretty familiar with heat stroke, heat exhaustion, (and) they do use a
variety of methods, like drinking or eating winter melon soup. One other thing that I
thought was interesting, that I hadn't heard and that we featured, is that some people in
the Vietnamese community would put lotion in their refrigerator and then put body lotion
on as a way to cool down, which I thought was cool.
I think that sometimes people who think that they come from cultures that are especially
hot, that's a group that we try to educate that the heat here is different maybe than where
they come from originally, and trying to take precautions around that.
What habits can people develop to stay cool – and healthy – during extreme heat
events?

A restaurant worker is featured in a
heat-related illness comic put out by
Seattle & King County Public Health.
(COURTESY OF ROBIN PFOHMAN)
Stay inside if you can, make sure you're out of the hot sun, drink plenty of water, move to
a cooler place. The restaurant worker in Chinatown (in the comic zine) actually was
somebody we interviewed in Chinatown who was concerned about the workers in the
Chinese restaurants because they have to keep the doors closed and it gets really hot in
there.
I think people don't know if they're on certain medications – for instance, psychotropic
medications, heart, blood pressure, those types of things – that they might be at
increased risk because their bodies are not able to cool down as much. Make sure kids
are protected, drinking water, wearing hats – those are the top messages. But I de nitely
think one of the things I didn't realize when I started this work a couple years ago is that
medications impact how you respond to heat and your ability to cool down.
How else has your department focused on the connections between climate change
and health?
Our focus has been to get a very clear picture about what our role as a public health
department should be and could be around climate change. One of the things we're
doing right now is having cross-departmental discussions around stormwater. How does
public health interface in stormwater considerations, and how will that be more

important with climate change? We're also focusing on transportation, like our bus
services moving to electric buses. How can we make that not only about climate change
but also about everyday health, and how is that going to make our air pollution better?
And for bus drivers who might not be quite ready for the change to a new bus: How can
we make (the conversation) about their health, about their children's health, about their
grandchildren's health?
Public health departments are uniquely positioned to really track climate and health
indicators to show how health is being impacted by climate change over time. One of the
things I'm really focused on is trying to work with our academic partners to get more
local research around climate change and health. There's national or international
research that's been looked at, but people here at the local level are kind of rubber-
against-the-road, especially trying to get funding for local health departments to do some
work around this issue. We really need to make the case at the local level, and there's not
a lot of data available to make that happen.
Katelyn Newman , Staff Writer
Katelyn Newman is a staff writer for the Healthiest Communities division at U.S. News & World R... READ
MORE »
Tags: United States, public health, heatstroke, global warming, University of Washington, Washington, health,
children

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