Transcript source
Using-AirRater-to-support-heat-stress-guidance-in-DarwinTranscript
Using_AirRater_to_support_heat_stress_guidance_in_Darwin_8_26_2021
[Image appears of Sharon Campbell on the screen and then the image changes to show Stephen Cook talking on the main screen and participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom]
Stephen Cook: Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us. We’d like to start today by an Acknowledgement of Country. And that’s the Darwin Living Lab acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. This project is collaborating in Darwin, the Larrakia people, and acknowledge their vibrant living cultures and knowledge systems and we pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging, and thank the community members who are working with us as we seek to develop meaningful engagement with Larrakia on their aspirations and their contributions to our work. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that each of you are joining us today and that we are located across Australia. So, I’m Stephen Cook, the Local Co-ordinator for the Darwin Living Lab. The Darwin Living Lab is a multi-partner, ten year collaboration between CSIRO and the three levels of government and its aim is to inform Darwin’s approach to heat mitigation and urban liveability.
So the Darwin Living Lab is an initiative under the Darwin City Deal between the City of Darwin, the Northern Territory Government and the Australian Government. And today is the fourth in our series of webinars and these webinars have been put in place of the annual symposium just due to Covid travel restrictions and limitations on travel. So for your colleagues and friends who aren’t able to make it today we’re recording this webinar and we’ll share online afterwards on the Darwin Living Lab website. So throughout the webinar, please add any questions using the Q&A feature that should be available through the webcast facility. We’ll do our best to respond at the conclusion of the talks. So today’s webinar is looking at the, how we’ve got to manage the risks of heat stress for outdoor workers. So the Darwin Living Lab is collaborating with the University of Tasmania, to find out about managing heat stress and air quality and air, outdoor workers using the AirRater App. So I’ll pass now to our first speaker of the day and the leader of the project, so Dr Sharon Campbell from the University of Tasmania, so over to you Sharon.
[Image changes to show Sharon Campbell talking on the main screen and participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Sharon Campbell: Yeah, hi everyone. I’ll just do a quick sound check, make sure you can hear me OK. Great, thank you. So, thanks so much Steve. My name’s Sharon Campbell. So I am an environmental health researcher at the University of Tasmania, part of the Environmental Health Research Group at the Menzies and I’ll be talking to you today about AirRater and the project that Steve mentioned which is helping outdoor workers mitigate their heat illness and how they can work towards, or how we can work towards getting some better heat stress guidance for outdoor workplaces in the Top End. So I’ll talk about AirRater and the project and then I’ll pass on to Professor Fay Johnston and she’ll talk more about air quality and then to Dr Simon Quilty who will talk more about heat. So, I’ll just share my screen.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a hand holding a Smartphone and then the image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a male and female standing on a rocky area next to water and the University of Tasmania logo and text appears: Using AirRater to support heat stress guidance in Darwin, Sharon Campbell, Postdoc researcher, Environmental Health Research Unit, Menzies Institute or Medical Research]
OK. OK, so hopefully you can hear that and you can see that. OK.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: What is AirRater?]
So, first of all I’ll just start to talk about what AirRater Is and you’ll hear this term a little bit through this presentation.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a hand operating the AirRater app on a Smartphone and text appears: AirRater is, A free smartphone app, With real-time data on temperature and air quality, A health protection tool, Developed by UTAS, Available across Australia, Award-winning, www.airrater.org]
So AirRater is actually an app, it’s a free Smartphone app and what it actually does is it gives you access to real time data about temperature and air quality and a few other environmental conditions. So you can see in the picture there, right down the bottom, you can see that the air quality in Darwin on that particular day was good and the temperature was 33.4oC with an apparent temperature of 33.3o which sounds about right for Darwin most of the year. What AirRater also does though, is it doesn’t just give you that information, but it also acts as a health protection tool and the way that it does that, is that it allows users to enter symptoms into the app that they suspect could be related to the environmental conditions where they are at the time. So for example, if the air quality is quite poor, and they feel like they’re sneezy or wheezy or their eyes are irritated, those sorts of symptoms, then they can pop that into the app. If it’s extremely hot, they might feel fatigued, or headachy, or dizzy and they can put those sorts of symptoms into the app as well.
And what the app does, is it grabs that location and the air quality and temperature at that particular time and matches that to their symptoms and then over time what the app is allowed, is able to do is to correlate those environmental conditions with their symptoms and help people work out what their triggers might be. So as I said, AirRater was developed by the University of Tasmania back in 2015. It is available right across Australia. We started off in Tasmania for a year or two and worked out what we were doing and then we spread to the ACT and then into the Northern Territory. When the South East Australian bushfires happened in, well half-way through 2019 heading towards the 2019-20 summer, we made the app available right across Australia, because there was such a demand for that. We’ve won quite a few awards, which has been fabulous for us, in the area of community resilience and also impact research. And you can find out a lot more about the app, www.airrater.org.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a flow diagram showing how the data is entered into the AirRater app moving through from input monitoring through to the actual users of the app and text appears: How does it work? Pollen monitoring, Particulate monitoring, Weather monitoring, Fire location and other enviro data, AirRater analytics, Real time spatial model, Pollen Particulates Weather, AirRater app, Individual symptom input, Individual app users, Air quality managers, Public health managers, Fire Managers, Clinicians]
So a little bit more detail about how it works. So, if we look at these diagrams, we’re going to move from left to right. So what we do is we grab a whole bunch of data that is already available and some of it we collect ourselves. So, in a few sites around Australia, in Tasmania and the ACT especially, we have pollen monitoring stations and we grab the data from those pollen monitoring stations every day and we have a huge suite of people that look at those slides everyday and count the pollen and we work out what types of pollen and how much pollen is in the air. Obviously, there’s peaks and troughs of when pollen exists and we’re coming into a high pollen season at the moment, into spring.
We also use the air quality monitors that are government-controlled air quality monitors right around the country and we pull in information about PM2.5 and PM10 so that’s the particulates that we’re most interested in from a health point of view. We also use some of those EPA monitors, sorry, the government monitors and the BOM monitors to pull in weather information, so temperature, relative humidity and wind speed and we work with fire agencies in some jurisdictions to help us locate where fires are happening and that can be displayed on the app as well.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
And so that’s a huge amount of data that’s happening right around Australia, pretty much all the time and that comes into the back end of AirRater and we do a lot of crunching of that data and we spit out some real time spatial models and that’s the thing that you can see on the app at the beginning there. So we can look at, you know, where, say for example, air quality is particularly poor, that’s colour coded on the app and modelled, the same for weather and for pollen, where those pollen counting stations exist. Then what happens is that spits it out into the app itself so users can actually see that information in a meaningful way. And so while those users can see that information, they also have the ability to input their individual symptoms, as I mentioned earlier and when they put enough of those symptoms in, what happens is that the app is eventually able to work out what conditions might be triggering those symptoms, so we usually need about 30 symptoms being reported for that.
And so, then we can tell people, when those conditions are in the air, that they might be, you know, experiencing, or, those, well they might be a trigger for their symptoms, so then they get to make the decision about whether they would like to do something different, and change their behaviour to reduce their exposure to that. So that comes in the form of individual notifications to particular users. We also have the ability within the app to send out general notifications which we’ve done quite a few times.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
So for example, we get a fire and it’s producing a lot of smoke then we can put out an area, put out a notification to an area to say that there’s smoke in the air and remind people what they need to do. So who uses all of this huge amount of information? Well, obviously, individual app users can use that information and I’ll talk about that in a sec. Folks that are right around the country that are concerned about the air quality, then they can use that information and of course public health policy makers who are interested in the health outputs of poor air quality can use that information and ultimately, what we’d really love is for clinicians, or GPs, or respiratory specialists to use that information and help their patients work out what their triggers might be.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph comparing the proportion and type of risk factor to smoke exposure, and text heading and text appears: Who uses AirRater?, 64% had one or more risk factors]
So who uses AirRater? Well, after the 2019-20 South East Australian bushfires, when we had a huge increase from 10,000 users up to just over 50,000 users in a short space of time. After that situation had eventually calmed down, we used that window to survey some of those AirRater users to find out what they did during that period of time and how they used the app and we gathered quite a lot of information about the, about AirRater at that time.
So we were curious to find out what sort of people were actually using AirRater. And what we found was that about 64% of the users, so just under two thirds of the users had one or more risk factors that gave them poorer health outcomes when they were exposed to smoke. And that was great because it meant that we were targeting the people that we really wanted to target. So these were people that had existing lung conditions, mainly asthma, people that were at the top end of the age-scale and the bottom end of the age-scale, and also people that had heart conditions or diabetes or women that were pregnant. So that’s a pretty general round up of who uses AirRater.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph comparing the percentages of people and the behaviour changes they implemented in response to the AirRater App and text appears: How do people use it?, 95% used information to change behaviours (to reduce smoke exposure)]
We were also really curious to find out what people did with that information when they were presented with it and so what we found was pleasingly, over 95% of people, used information from the app to change their behaviour and that led to a reduction in their smoke exposure. So, things like, they could look at the app and say, “Well, it’s smoky outside, I’ll stay indoors” or “I’ll close my doors and my windows” or probably even better, “The smoke has passed for right now, it looks better outside and I can see on the app that the air quality is OK and so I’ll open my doors and windows and give my home a chance to air out”, which is quite important when it’s smoky for a prolonged period of time.
It also gave people the opportunity to work out when they wanted to exercise outdoors or any other outdoor activity or when they should be doing that indoors. And a whole bunch of other behaviours there that would help people reduce their exposures. That was really pleasing for us that people were using it in the way that we intended them to use it.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a Mike sitting at a kitchen table using the AirRater app on a Smartphone and different people’s comments about the AirRater app appear in speech bubbles beneath the text heading: What do people say about it?]
We continually get a lot of really amazing feedback and that’s one of the amazing things about working on the AirRater team is we, we hear from people all the time that AirRater’s made a huge difference to their life. So this person which we got just the other day actually, “I can’t praise your work in the app enough, I never would have understood what was wrong with me without it, and it’s vastly improved my quality of life because it helps me avoid exposure on the bad days.” And that’s just fabulous feedback. This one, “It’s been lifesaving for my husband who has had a heart valve replacement and I have had some lung problems”. And quotes like this, which make it really practical for people, “My lung specialist wanted me to walk 1.5km a day. AirRater showed me when to walk the 1.5km in the supermarket rather than outside, which my specialist said was an excellent idea!”. So there’s a huge very practical application of that as well. And here’s one of our fabulous users, Mike, in Hobart using the app.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a text heading: What is the project about?]
So let’s talk a little bit about what the project is.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of workers on a construction site and text appears: Outdoor workers: heat, humidity and air quality?, Extreme heat contributes to workplaces injury and illness, Poor air quality gives a multiplicative effect, Outdoor workers are at higher risk, Greater exposure, PPE, Productivity impacts, Workplace culture contributes to behaviour]
I guess where we’re, we know a fair bit about pollen and a fair bit about air quality from applications that we’ve had using AirRater in the past and now we need to know a lot more about heat. I guess our roots are from Tasmania, where it’s not as hot. Obviously, in the Top End it’s much, much hotter and we have targeted outdoor workers, because they are more exposed. So we’re curious to find out how outdoor workers can use the app in the build-up and the wet season, when the heat and humidity is highest.
So, we know that extreme heat contributes to workplace illnesses and injuries and we’ve known that for quite some time. And there’s a couple of reasons for that, which I’ll run through in a sec. We know that poor air quality on top of heat and humidity also contributes to those workplace illnesses and injuries. And outdoor workers are at higher risk, obviously because they’re outdoors, and so they have a greater exposure to that heat, humidity, and poor air quality. But also, because their PPE is often, you know, for lots of reasons, often needs to be quite warm, so long sleeves, long pants, thick coverings that sort of thing, so that increases their, their heat range.
Unfortunately heat does impact productivity at work and that’s been studied to quite a bit of an extent, probably doubly unfortunately. Workplace culture unfortunately contributes to that behaviour that stops people adapting, or putting in adaptive behaviours that reduce their heat exposure, so you know, that’s very common in Australia, that you’re just told to get on with it, it’s just a hot day, you’ll be fine. Unfortunately heat stress can be life-threatening and we need to recognise that we want to reduce the impacts right at the beginning of that spectrum rather than right at the end when people are forced to go to hospital.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of cranes on a construction site and text appears: How does this link to AirRater? Outdoor workers enter heat-related symptoms into the app, Environmental conditions at that time and location are recorded, October-March, Data analysis to see if there is any link between conditions and symptoms]
So, how does that all link to AirRater? What we’re wanting to do, is to get outdoor workers to enter heat-related symptoms into the app where their environmental conditions at that time and that location will be recorded. If they can do that from October through to March, that’s obviously the warmest time of the year, and what we’ll do after March, after we’ve gathered all of that information, is to analyse it and see what we can work out, so when people were putting in those symptoms, what were the conditions and what we can work out next?
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of outdoor workers on a construction site and text appears: How can you help?, Looking for outdoor workers to participate in the study, And organisations with large outdoor workforces who can help recruit participants, Email air.rater@utas.edu.au]
How can you help? Well, we’re looking for outdoor workers to participate in the study, so if you spend that majority of your time working outdoors, and you have a Smartphone, we’d love you to download the app and start entering symptoms. But also, if you’re an organisation and you have a large proportion of people that work outdoors, we’re looking to contact those organisations and to help recruit participants into the study. For now, if you can do that by sending an email to air.rater@utas.edu.au and then we’ll be in touch and find out, and you can find out a little bit more about the study. So that’s it from me. I guess we’ll go to questions at the end. And I will stop sharing my screen and I’ll hand over to Fay who will talk a lot more about the intricacies of air quality in the Top End.
[Image changes to show Sharon on the main screen listening and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Fay Johnston: Thanks, very much Sharon and hello everyone.
[Image changes to show Fay Johnston on the main screen talking to the camera and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
So I’m having a bit of a departure from heat to outdoor air quality, and it’s another important issue for outdoor workers. And I’ve had most of my career actually studying the health effects of bushfire smoke, and that career began in Darwin in about the year 2000 when I did my first study, having worked as a GP and had a lot of feedback from patients that the dry season burn-offs were affecting their lungs, and that began a whole career investigating the topic. So I'll just share my screen. Hopefully, successfully. Share.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of bushland on the left and text appears on the right: Bushfire smoke and health in the Top End, Prof Fay Johnston, University of Tasmania, Menzies Institute for Medical Research]
So what I’ll do is I’m hoping you’re all seeing the full screen now, is first just talk about bushfire smoke and why it’s a health issue in the first half, and then in the second half I’ll talk about the situation in Darwin and the historical and current air quality in Darwin.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of tall trees on the left and text appears on the right: Outline, What is bushfire smoke?, What does it do in the body?, How can this lead to a health problem?, What’s happening with smoke pollution in the Top End]
But, just to set the scene, I’ll talk about what smoke is, what it does to the body, how it leads to health problems, and what’s happening in the Top End.
[Image changes to show a close view of a fire and text appears: What is smoke? CxHy+O2-> Energy + CO2 + H2O + stuff]
So let’s start by thinking about smoke, and what it is, and it’s what’s given off when something burns, when bush burns and really there’s thousands of chemical reactions that go into making smoke and converting the hydrocarbons that are, you know the lignans and all the things that make up wood and leaves and things that burn in the bush with a bit of oxygen, combine and burn giving off energy and carbon dioxide and water vapour, and 100% efficient burning will just give you that, but burning is never 100% efficient, and so there’s a whole lot of other chemicals that always go with bushfire smoke.
[Image changes to show a chart explaining what is given off from different fuels when they are combusted and text heading and text appears: Smoke – Product of burning hydrocarbons, Non fossilised biomass fuels (includes tobacco), Fossil fuels (includes oil, gas and petrol), Grass/Forest, eat, Brown coal, Combustion, Particulate Matter, Gases – Inorganic acids, Hydrocarbons, Organic molecules, Metals, Relative proportions depend on substrate, moisture, O2 availability, fire intensity, physical and chemical reactions in the atmosphere]
And depending on the conditions of combustion really shapes the spectrum of all these other chemicals. So here, I’ve got another schematic, showing much the same thing. You can get very, very similar mixtures from burning all sorts of hydrocarbons, from biomass through to peat to brown coal. It’s essentially the same thing in the, you know, just gone through a few ice ages and fossilised but you get combustion, moist smouldering combustion is far less efficient, gives off far greater suite of all these chemicals than efficient hot flaming combustion.
[Image shows a circle appearing around the list under the “Particulate Matter” heading: Elemental carbon, Organic carbon molecules]
So I think if you see on the left here, smoke’s made up in general you can classify it into two components really, large particles, suspended particles or particulate matter, suspended aerosols or liquid droplets, usually it’s some kind of carbon compound, either elemental carbon like soot or organic carbon molecules. That’s the one that’s been most extensively studied. It’s the one that’s studied for urban air pollution, you know, vehicle emissions. There’s a vast literature on particulate matter and wherever it comes from it seems to have pretty similar health effects. And then along with that you get the whole suite of the toxic co-pollutants and all the gases and I’ve only, like, there’s literally hundreds of them, a lot like cigarette smoke.
[Image shows the cursor pointing to the co-pollutants in the lists on the slide]
So but a few of the common well-known ones, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen compounds, sulphur compounds, hydrocarbons, particularly polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAHs, they’re a highly carcinogenic component and organic molecules, aldehydes, phenol, very irritating and then depending on what’s burning and what’s in them, you can get trace metals as well. So the relative proportions of all these things depend on combustion conditions, actually more than they depend on what’s actually burning. So what happens?
[Image shows text inside a star shape appearing on the slide on the left: Combustion conditions are crucial, Smouldering produces far more particles and other toxic products of incomplete combustion than flaming]
The smoke goes into the air. Sorry, combustion conditions are crucial. I’ve just made that point and smouldering gives off orders of magnitude more pollution than flaming.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of an air monitoring station, doctors with various patients, and text appears: PM2.5 – immediate impacts, Lung – more inflammation, reduced immunity, more infections, Heart – abnormal rhythms, Blood vessels – poor function, abnormal development, Blood – more likely to clot, General – inflammation and oxidative stress]
OK, so as I said there’s a huge literature on air pollution and PM2.5 and what I’m really confining myself to in this talk is what’s the studies that have looked at PM2.5 in the context of a bushfire, or a planned burn, or the smoke mixture you get from vegetation fires. And there’s a lot more evidence now than there was 20 years ago and in general, the results of these studies are much the same as the results from urban air pollution. The one exception is anything to do with the lungs and irritating the lungs is far worse for bushfire smoke, presumably because of all the other components of smoke that go with the PM2.5.
[Image continues to show the same slide]
So what it does and it’s, it’s, everybody gets affected by smoke. Everybody breathes it in. It goes into your lungs. Some of them, the very smallest ones can go into your blood vessels and your body will react to them, so it’s a stress and it’s an irritant. Your body will react in much the same way that it does to any injury or infection or threat of any sort, stress, it will activate its basic immune system often called the innate immune system. So that is more inflammation and immune responses, increased immune cells, that’s in the immediate term but it also can reduce your immunity to infections, particularly when the pollution goes on for longer. It makes the heart and the heart rhythms more stressed, reduced heart rate variability and if you’re at high risk of a cardiac arrest that stress rhythm can put you at a higher risk of a serious event like that being triggered. It affects blood vessels, it reduces their function and makes the blood more likely to clot and really the upshot of that is, if you’re already at high risk of a heart attack, it can be the final trigger that actually causes a heart attack.
And then throughout the body there is inflammation and oxidative stress is, the body’s response to having highly reactive chemicals, which are great if you want to kill bacteria and germs in your lungs, but they can also damage DNA, so repeated exposure increases, you know, lifetime exposure is associated with cancer. But, if you take a healthy population, I’ve done quite a lot of studies, these are pictures from various studies of adults and children who’ve been affected by smoke, either during planned burns or the bottom two are from a follow up from the Hazelwood coalmine fire, it’s pretty subtle when you measure it, in most people. So, so the effect’s there, you can see it if you look for it, but it’s not like a fire. It’s not like a wall of flames that’s just going to really damage everyone in the path.
[Image changes to show two males and a female looking at the camera and text appears: Does this matter? Let’s think about individual people]
It’s more like a stress but it affects an entire population, and really how does it play out in a population? And this is where it’s important to understand that it all depends on the underlying vulnerability of the individual people and our population, of course, has pregnant women, babies, right up to people with advanced years, lots of chronic diseases. So there’s lots of people who are particularly at risk and it’s that group of people who disproportionately bear the brunt of smoke. Healthy, young, fit people can handle a lot of smoke. The smoke can go and they can get better. If it goes on for years, that’s a different story. The yearly average background, you know, it’s a bit like being a smoker or having high blood pressure or high cholesterol, what goes on every day, even if it’s just a small increase in background air pollution, that can start causing, you know, increasing rates of heart disease and lung disease in a community, but for short episodes relating to bushfires, really the issue is those at higher risk can be triggered, their illness. They can be made worse.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of various people on the right of the slide including a person taking an asthma puffer, and a female holding a baby and text appears on the left: Some people or groups are at much higher risk than others, Medical illness, lung diseases – eg asthma, heart or vascular diseases – eg previous stroke or angina, Diabetes, Older age, Reduced organ system function, Greater prevalence chronic disease, Younger age – pregnancy and infancy, Developing systems, Disadvantage, Greater disease burden, Reduced access to care]
So, if you’ve already got a lung disease, say you’ve got asthma, your lungs are sensitive, right, you breathe in smoke, smoke’s highly irritating, it’s going to have an inflammatory response and that’s going to make your symptoms worse. And within people with asthma there’s a range of sensitivity but more symptoms, more coughing, more wheezing, some asthma attacks, trips to hospital, you know, and in the most extreme, rare case it can precipitate death from asthma. Similarly if you’ve already got cardiovascular disease, if you get angina, if you’ve had a stroke, that means your blood vessels aren’t great. There’s probably, you know, thinner bits, narrowings here and there, so if you go in a smoky environment, it only has to be a small rise above background, the effects from smoke are immediate with no lower threshold. So any rise above background can cause this and in fact the effect plateaus off as you get to quite extreme smoke pollution, so it’s the everyday small rises that have the main effect.
So, similarly older age, greater incidence of chronic diseases. Diabetes, I should mention. Chronic pollution is associated with rates of diabetes in the community and then day-to-day fluctuations in PM including bushfire smoke is associated with decreased blood glucose control, so ambulance callouts for hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar and high blood sugar increase in periods of poor air quality. So if you’ve got diabetes and there’s a lot of smoke around, then it’s a good idea to pay closer attention to your control.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
With younger age, it’s a slightly different issue. Young people don’t generally have chronic diseases. If they do, they are at higher, at risk, but you know, the unborn babies, very young babies and infants of course, are still developing, developing their lungs, their hearts, their immune systems. Their propensity to develop allergic conditions and all of these things get influenced by air pollution and there’s not a lot of studies but we’re increasingly seeing that even episodes of smoke over sort of weeks can have measurable differences years later in young kids. The… excuse me sorry, I just had a phone call, I just need to turn that off. Sorry, I’ll get back to it. So that’s young people and then people with disadvantage for any reason, access to healthcare, language, Aboriginal Australians, greater disease burden, less access to care, anybody who’s at any kind of disadvantage, all these things are, of course, magnified.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a triangle divided into coloured strips starting with red and working through to grey and headings appear inside the strips beneath the text heading: Impacts of exposure – what happens at a population level?, Deaths, Hospital admissions, Doctor visits, Symptoms of illness, Physiological changes, Pollution exposure]
So, in a community, this is kind of how it looks. This is Sydney under a big cloud of smoke from planned burns. The entire, so we’re talking 5 million people here, so the number of people who are in a higher risk group are actually very high. So everyone’ll get these subtle changes. Some will get symptoms. Some will need to see a doctor and possibly one in a million, the smoke will be what precipitates their death. And if that goes on for ten days, the impact’s ten times greater. If the smoke is ten times more severe, then the impact’s ten times greater, roughly, up to a certain point.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Acute vs chronic air pollution, Question – Are the impacts of air pollution over one year the same as the sum of the impacts each day during the year?, Answer? Higher yearly average PM puts more people into the risk pool for getting a serious event with a daily spike in air pollution, Repeated and cumulative exposure to air pollution is a risk factor for developing heart, lung, and brain diseases and diabetes, There is no safe lower threshold, and every increment is important]
And I’ve mentioned the difference between acute and chronic air pollution; the longer it goes the worse it is.
[Image changes to show a view of bushland in the Northern Territory and text appears: Smoke pollution in the Top End]
And, I’ll move on just in the interests of time. As I said, I started studying smoke pollution on health in the Top End around the year 2000 and air quality monitoring in Darwin, I think got going around 2004 although we put some monitors in a bit earlier than that. And at the time we were interested in looking back in time to see what the smoke pollution had been before the air quality monitoring and we did a study that was published about 15 years ago now, where we took visibility records from Darwin airport, because there weren’t any air quality monitors, and were able to build a statistical model to predict the PM2.5 because in the dry season it, the one overwhelmingly big predictor of visibility is smoke from savannah fires.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line graph showing Darwin’s dry season air pollution for a decade below the text heading: Darwin’s dry season air pollution by decade 1955 – 2004]
So in that way, we were able to build up a picture of what dry season smoke pollution was like for a 50 year period, right. So, this is how it looks and down the bottom it’s, sort of, you can see, it’s in two groups these lines. The bottom two are the first 20 years, 1955 to 1974 and the top three are the next 30 years, which was 1975-2004. So you can see early on, lesser in the early dry season, a bit more in the late dry season, not too bad, that’s up until 1974. Of course, 1974 was Cyclone Tracy and huge development in Darwin after that, so expansion, Kakadu opening, B. Tech, I remember the shooting of all the buffalo, you know, which used to eat the fuels, Kakadu expanding, more humans visiting, more people dropping incendiaries, accidentally or deliberately. So it seems there was a step change there to more early dry season smoke, which seemed pretty stable for about 30 years and late dry season more variable, you see these two blue lines are the earliest and latest decades. So a bit more variable in the late dry season but a clear trend to more smoke in the early dry season, so these are averages by month over a whole decade. So the question is, and it was around 2004 that air quality monitoring in Darwin started. So what’s happened since then?
So this study, with this particular method, looked back over that time period. We can actually take monitor data from Darwin and look forwards from 2004 and I don’t know what you think, what would you predict, particularly those of you who live there now, or who have lived there for a long time, would you expect it to be much the same or would you expect it to be different? You know, what has changed, with the burning, you know, in and around Darwin since 2004?
[Image changes to show a new slide showing two line graphs showing the number of exceedances of Australia’s daily air quality standard on the left and the yearly average air pollution data and text appears: Australian yearly average air quality standard PM2.5]
So this is yearly data, yearly average data, and it goes from 2004 to 2019. And the figure on the left is a simple count of the number of exceedances of Australia’s daily air quality standard. So, you can see in the early part of the period it was around five per year, and in the later part seems to increase quite a lot, going up in a big way. On the right is the yearly average air pollution, yearly average PM2.5 and this line here at eight is Australia’s air quality standard, you know, which, may be being lowered soon, but there’s no safe lower threshold, but clearly the trend here is going up, huge variability, but the last couple of years over ten. It’s actually quite serious. I think that, you know, I’d need to check but it probably puts Darwin as, possibly the most polluted capital city in Australia, if yearly averages are going to stay up at around ten or more here. How does that look by time of year?
[Image changes to show a new slide showing two line graphs showing the seasonal number of exceedances on the left, and the season average concentration on the right beneath the text heading: Trends in early and late dry season air pollution in Darwin 2004 – 2019]
So this figure has three lines. Again on the left, we’ve just got the raw count of exceedances and on the right we’ve got the average, but it’s split into three time periods. Blue is wet season, so that’s the line at the bottom, no exceedances, fantastic air quality, less than five. That’s great. That’s how we get it in Tassie quite a lot. Green, the next one up, is late dry season. So, you know, a bit of bouncing around on number of exceedances and the average late dry season, being August, September, October, but not a lot of change. Possibly an upward trend, not much. But red, is quite a dramatic change. Lots more exceedances, and a very clear trend upwards and they’re the months of May, June, July. So we took this data and I actually plotted it on the data we got way back from our earlier study just so I could line it up and see it all on one plot, but remember these are two different data sources, so they’re not really directly comparable.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line graph of air pollution showing April to October over six different time periods represented by six coloured lines]
but how would you expect to see it? So here, you’ve got the historical 50 years and here the red line is the latter part, 2013-2019, so that’s the average over a seven-year period. But we did see that late dry season pollution hadn’t changed much and that seems to fit so it kind of implies this red line might not be too far off where it ought to be if, given that they were sort of measured differently, but we have a massive increase in early dry season air pollution and one that’s historically unprecedented, like, the, either it’s been similar or a bit lower, and the trajectory is going up. So as a doctor and an air pollution epidemiologist, I’m seriously worried about this, because back here when I was doing my early studies showing associations with admissions to Darwin Hospital for asthma for respiratory conditions for heart attacks, particularly in Aboriginal people, you know, we’re that much worse again and the fact that it’s so chronic means it will be affecting the health of the whole population.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of bushland in the Northern Territory and text appears: Conclusions, Bushfire smoke is bad for your health, especially ongoing, persistent impacts, Any reduction in exposure will benefit health, Air quality in the Top End is getting worse especially in the early dry season, A serious and worsening public health problem]
So, I think my time is up and I’ll leave it there, so just briefly to recap. The main point, bushfire smoke is bad for your health. Especially if and when it goes on more than a day or so and any reduction, the corollary, any break for a few hours, any, sort of, getting into air conditioned environments, is beneficial, but air quality in the Top End is getting worse, especially in the early dry season. It’s a particular issue for outdoor workers and also because a lot of the housing is open, the ability to get out of it, or to find a cleaner air space is, is tricky, and so it’s a serious and worsening public health problem. So thank you. I might leave it there.
[Image changes to show Fay talking to the camera on the main screen and then the image changes to show an Australian map showing different colours for summer temperatures and text appears: Summer 2018-19 Max Temperature Deciles, Base Period – Dec 1910 to Feb 2021]
And I’ll unshare and I’ll really look forward to hearing your thoughts about this, because I think it clearly needs attention, whatever’s going on. OK. I don’t need to unshare. I’ll, Dr Simon Quilty, hand over to you. Thank you.
Dr Simon Quilty: Thank you. You’ve got me. You can all hear me loud and clear?
Fay Johnston: Yep, yep.
Dr Simon Quilty: Thank you, so I’m Simon Quilty. I’m a specialist physician down here in Alice Springs. Thanks for having me today. So I have a, I think it’s a really interesting discussion around AirRater. My interest is in heat. So I’m originally from Sydney, but in 2000 I spent my first significant chunk of time in the Northern Territory and I spent four years in Darwin, eight years in Katherine, and four years in total coming up in Alice Springs. So, I’m nearly a Territorian, and as a doctor, I arrived as a junior doctor at Royal Darwin Hospital in 2004, just as a CSIRO report on climate change was published and I wondered how climate change was going to impact the community when that report was so clearly showing the deep concerns of what was to come. Sadly, for all of us, the predicted increase in temperature of that report by 2030 has already been surpassed in 2020. In 2018 and ‘19, Australia had an extraordinarily hot period, as most of you will remember.
[Image changes to show another Australian map showing different coloured areas based on temperature from blue being to lowest on record to orange being the highest on record and text appears: Summer 2018-19 Max Temperature Deciles, Base Period – Dec 1910 to Feb 2021]
In Central Australia, that was the really hot year, but in 2019-20 it was the Top End and I was in Katherine, which was one of the hottest large towns in Australia, and it had by far and away the hottest record ever, the hottest summer ever recorded. So, the average year in Katherine sees six days above 40 degrees Celsius. In 2019, it was 54 days. And I lived it, I saw what it did to the community and over the last five years, I’ve become increasingly aware that the most significant threat to public health and to all Northern Territorians is obviously climate change and that year really proved it to me. And so the way the climate impacts places like the Northern Territory, particularly in the Top End, is very seasonal. And so when I was in Katherine Hospital for those seven and a half years leading up to 2019, I could see the seasonality of, of the practice of medicine in, in that town.
Most towns in Australia, particularly those in southern climates, don’t have any seasonality. What you see on any one day isn’t particularly different to another. There has been substantial increases in admissions for instance around the bushfire smoke, and there is definitely co-associated patterns, for instance influenza, which really bursts out in the colder weather. In the Top End, things turn on their head a bit, and so we have an influenza season in Darwin and Katherine in January and February. Influenza isn’t a disease of coldness, it’s a disease of people cramming together and so when the weather gets really hot, people go indoors and viruses like influenza spread much more quickly. So it’s a bit counterintuitive.
[Image changes to show a photo of a shanty type tin house with beds set up outside the house]
And so in that town that I worked in, up until the end of 2019, it was also one of the poorest towns in Australia, with the highest mortality rate and the extent of poverty cannot be understated for any of you that have known town camps or remote communities, well you’ll know that these dwellings are often incredibly overcrowded at baseline with every multidimensional level of poverty seen right in front of you. So this photograph I took, it’s a photograph of the Warlpiri Camp which is just south of the centre of town. It’s a tin house. There were about 20 residents and it was taken in the December of 2019, right at the very hot peak of the year.
[Image changes to show a photo of the inside of the tin shanty house and the image shows various blankets on the ground inside the house]
These houses in Walpiri Camp are single cavity meaning that there’s no internal walls. There’s a shared bathroom facility across the wall. People sleep on mattresses or on blankets on the ground and people in Walpiri Camp joked about this particular house, because a car had backed into it they called it the air conditioned house. But what can you see from this infrastructure is that there’s no, there’s no cladding, there’s no insulation, it is tin. There’s a single power point. There’s no running water inside and people are extremely vulnerable. So we now have this new heat which we can expect to see worsen in the next decade and we have a very large proportion of our Indigenous Territorians living in conditions. This is really one end of the extreme, but it is not uncommon to see, for instance, my children to go to school with kids in their class and there were 13 people living in a two bedroom unit.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a box of Panadol, a NovoRapid FlexPen, and below a bar graph showing insulin rate prescriptions in percentages]
And so, I have some pretty overwhelming proof that as doctors, our profession isn’t really taking account of the significance of this heat. And it’s really exciting to see AirRater apps and the movement towards, well, what are we going to do as things get hotter in the Territory? Even Paracetamol is supposed to be stored below 25 degrees Celsius. I regularly send patients home on insulin and it’s supposed to be stored at between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius before it’s opened and yet I know that for the majority of my indigenous patients, having a fridge in the home is a luxury that many of them don’t have.
And just to remind you, insulin isn’t something that’s not uncommonly prescribed. In 2018, the rates were estimated to be at 23% of all remote living people. And when you consider the Indigenous population in places like Central Australia and the Top End, remote communities probably have rates of diabetes up to 40%.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing two line graphs showing daily temperature with electricity usage in households and text appears: Energy Poverty in Remote Housing]
So these are western medications that we expect our patients to take and yet they do not have the infrastructure or facilities to be able to cope with that heat, and so it’s pretty certain that for most of my patients their medications have breached their temperature storage conditions before they’ve even got home and they’re getting home into energy poverty houses.
So we have, this is an early look at some research that we’ve, that we have, that we will hopefully publish in the next six to eight weeks. As you all know, there’s some healthy living priorities that are well spelt out in Closing the Gap reports. Eleven of them have been defined from research that originated in Central Australia in the early 2000s and six of them are dependent on electricity and that includes air conditioning for thermal comfort and safety and particularly when the temperature gets up to 50 degrees which it is now doing in Central Australia, it’s thermal safety, not thermal comfort. Anyone that’s left at 50 degrees without shelter will not survive very long. So this is, this is 3,500 remote houses energy consumption and we divided them into small using, medium using, and high using electricity consumers.
What’s interesting is the Northern Territory Department of Housing has a policy that mandates air conditioners on all public housing south of Elliot and north of Elliot all houses are mandated to have ceiling fans and this is because obviously the cost of running refrigerative air conditioning in humid environments is very, very high and the air conditioning that they are alluding to in their document is actually evaporative air conditioning, which is common down here, in Central Australia.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing four line graphs below the text heading: Energy Poverty in Remote Housing]
And so, when you start to get to know the Indigenous community who use Smart meters and power cards you realise that energy security is an everyday anxiety-provoking issue. We’ve demonstrated that 91% of all households in remote Northern Territory disconnect from power because they’ve run out of money every year, and compared to the Eastern Seaboard that figure is 1%. Remote housing residents are not protected by energy market regulations and from the average energy consuming house, they disconnect from power every fourth day for an average of about five hours and in the really hot weather, it’s every third day. And so, just when people need their electricity most, they disconnect from power.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing contractors installing solar panels on a house roof in the outback and text appears: Longden, Quilty, Heat related mortality: an urgent need to recognise and record]
And so it is really common for Aboriginal people to feel very anxious about Mondays, because the new Smart meters will provide what is called friendly credit until Monday when they are expected to go and pay for the electricity that they’ve used over the weekend and often households have to decide between purchasing food versus purchasing electricity. There's some good news. This is the first house, Aboriginal Department of Housing house in remote or town camp Northern Territory that has had solar panels on its roof and I’m working on some projects to ensure that this rolls out more regularly because solar is a complete solution to the extreme energy poverty that Aboriginal Northern Territorians experience. And when I say it’s extreme, I actually mean extreme. So I’m working with my colleagues at ANU who are interested in this issue of heat in the Northern Territory and I’m working with Lee White who is a policy expert and she has reassured me that there is nowhere in the developed world that comes anywhere close to the energy poverty that Indigenous Australians in remote communities live with every day.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a table showing “Deaths in Australia between January, 2006 and October 2017”]
And so how can I be sure, so one of the problems when I send patients home is that as a doctor I’m not really thinking about these conditions of home, the overcrowding, the lack of refrigeration, the lack of air conditioning and it’s something that I see every day in my colleagues. They discharge patients regularly without understanding and even me, before we saw these latest statistics, I had no idea how severe the energy crisis was in the Territory. To give you an example, in Tennant Creek earlier this year, there was a young person with a severe lung condition. She ran out of power. She spent the last of her money which was about $10 catching a taxi between family’s houses to try and find enough money to repower her card, but she had to catch a taxi to the place where she would recredit her power card, and she didn’t make it and she, the reason that she wanted her electricity on was because she had an oxygen concentrator at home and she died as a result.
So we’re regularly sending people home, as doctors, into this environment that’s extremely hot and even for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory who are very used to living with heat, it is getting much, much hotter. And so in 2020 Tom Longden and myself published this paper in [47:19] Energy. We have been using Gasparrini epidemiological approaches to determine the actual heat-attributable mortality in Australia. Between January 2006 and October 2017, there was 1.7 million deaths in Australia and epidemiological modelling shows that 36,000 of these deaths were attributable to heat and yet the number of death certificates that recorded heat as a cause of death was only 179. Zero people died from heat stroke between that period and I can assure you that is not the case even for Alice Springs Hospital. So one of the problems with heat is that us western biomedical doctors who work in air conditioned emergency departments and wards all day, simply don’t realise the extent of the heat. But I do think that in the Northern Territory we are much more aware of it than in other places and I think that this, the Territory’s actually leading the discussion in this space now.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing the relative risk as compared to the temperature in two bar graphs and text heading appears: Temperature Attributable Mortality in the NT, 1980 – 1999, 2000 – 2019]
And so I’ve got some other research that I’d like to quickly talk to you about in the Northern Territory and this is heat attributable mortality using Antonio Gasparrini’s time-series analysis. So I’ll quickly talk you through these graphs. The RR on the left hand side is the relative risk so 1.0 is your standard risk of dying on any one day and then the bottom here is the temperature. That’s the average temperature. And so an average temperature of 30 degrees Celsius means that it probably got to 40 degrees during the day and dropped to 26 at night. And so these are very, very hot temperatures. Gasparrini who developed this internationally accepted technique has been helping me on it and he could not believe how extreme the heat was in the Northern Territory.
So what we did first of all, with our heat-attributable mortality and what you can see is this U-shape where the blue indicates cool-associated mortality, but it’s not mortality, you’re actually protected in the Northern Territory from the cooler weather but when it starts getting hotter, your chance of dying on any one day increases and so what you can see is two time periods, the first 20 years of the study, versus the second 20 years of the study, and heat attributable mortality is actually going up with time. Now that could be because the climate has been warming, but it’s only a very subtle warming compared to what we’re about to, to receive. What is interesting is that in the 20 years before, versus the 20 years after 2000 the infrastructure and the air conditioning capacity and design of housing has substantially improved, particularly for non-indigenous people.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing the relative risk compared to the temperature in two bar graphs showing age groups of <50, and 50+]
And so despite the fact that we have more air conditioning and better structures in which to shelter from heat, it appears that we are becoming potentially more susceptible to the same type of heat. Age is the single biggest risk factor. Age over 50, you are five times as likely to die on a very hot day in the Northern Territory as you are on a very cool day.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing two bar graphs comparing the relative risk with the temperature for the low socio economic region and the high socio-economic region, and text appears: Temperature Attributable Mortality in the NT]
And what is most interesting of all is that low socio-economic versus high socio-economic, seems to suggest that high socio-economic may be at more risk and there’s lots of really interesting things that can be teased out about this and these are preliminary findings, but what it suggests to me is that what we think we’re doing with air conditioning is counterintuitive and perhaps may be even harming us. So what I witnessed in Katherine, when it got really, really hot is that Aboriginal people would not avoid the heat. They lived with the heat. Non-indigenous people like myself, we’d shelter from the heat and as soon as the build-up arrived in October or November, you’d shut your doors and your windows and you’d turn your air conditioning on and many people would sleep with doonas on their beds. Now that process of hiding from the heat does not allow your body to adapt to the extreme temperatures, and we know through people like Matt Brearley up in Darwin that physiological adaptation to heat takes about 15 days. When you are constantly cycling in and out of air conditioning, you may well be maladapting yourself to a hotter environment.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a female drinking a bottle of Coca Cola with a beach in the background]
Not, and on top of that, so I kind of liken it to a cold bottle of Coca-Cola on a really hot day. It might feel really good, but it’s possibly not that good for you. And so we use air conditioning at the moment in a very blunt conversation and we need to understand it in a much more nuanced way.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a picture of a person sleeping in a hammock and text appears: In the NT we don’t really understand heat, or how to deal with it…]
So when we look at Indigenous Australians, they have a culture and a society and a genetic adaptation to heat that has taken tens of thousands of years to achieve and they live with heat in very sensible ways. I often see, when I ride my pushbike home from work, Aboriginal people sitting under a tree in the park looking at me and laughing at me, the silly white fella, for riding his pushy home on a 45 degree day. There’s lots of things that we could be doing very differently, but they’re all about cultural adaptation.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing Simon talking to the camera on the main screen and participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
So I guess I’ll leave that with you today for the conversations, but I think, the essence of what I would like to say today is that culture change is being really unvalued and all of the talk is about technological change. Technological change is probably not as good as culture change. Thanks very much.
[Image changes to show Stephen Cook talking to the camera and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom]
Stephen Cook: Thanks very much Simon. That’s a fantastic presentation and thanks to all the presenters. So we do have a little bit of time to, to go through some questions. So just a reminder if you would like to submit a question, just to use the Q&A function but we’ll get straight into it just because there’s not a lot of time left. So Sharon, I might put the first question set to you. A few around AirRater. And so given the AirRater models to date, is it possible to predict the environmental conditions ahead of time and can you send notifications pre-empting heightened conditions or only send notifications based on current conditions?
[Image shows Sharon talking in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen while Stephen listens on the main screen]
Sharon Campbell: Yep. Good question.
[Image changes to show Sharon on the main screen talking to the camera and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
We’re actually in the process with some Federal Government funding to update AirRater to incorporate something called AQSX which is a smoke forecasting model. So AirRater’s going through that process at the moment and the forecasting model has been tested outside of the scope of AirRater and has proven to be quite, quite successful. Obviously we’ve got the BOM as the experts on forecasting temperature and their heatwave service uses a thing called the Excess Heat Factor and that’s a part of the model for AirRater as well. So yes, so when the BOM would predict a heat wave then AirRater will predict a heatwave, because it’s exactly the same model. So great question.
[Image changes to show Stephen talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Stephen Cook: Thanks Sharon. Fay I might direct one to you around so the, so a question around fires producing less overall smoke, so is that an assumption that stands up and so just a question around so for air quality implications, are we better off burning off grasses by cool burns, or should we encourage higher temperature burns? I’m not sure if you can have a go at that question?
[Image changes to show Fay talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Fay Johnston: Yep. So there’s a lot of complexity in that and the answer’s kind of yes and no and most of the research is done in small scale like, you know, pyrotron labs on this kind of thing and the amount of smoke production depends on conditions. So cool burns might be more smouldering, they might not. That’s more smoke, but often cool burns are much smaller in size so if they’re little cool burns, they’re not going to give off much smoke in terms of a big community-wide, atmosphere-wide, city-wide air pollution, so it depends on the number of burns, the geographical area, area burnt as well as the conditions, whether they’re highly efficient, and then if they’re highly efficient and hot, you may burn way more, because you might get crown fires.
So it’s a trade-off of how much burns and the conditions that it’s burnt under. So, you can control that totally in a firebox, you know, wood heaters if you really want flaming hot fires. When it comes to savannah fires, it’s a bit more complicated but earlier cool season burns, if there’s an awful lot of them and the grass is still wet and there’s more smouldering, you know, my worry is that that actually offsets the fact that you’re not having crown fires. It might be that you win on one but you lose a bit more on the other.
[Image changes to show Stephen talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Stephen Cook: Great. Thanks, Fay. So Simon, yeah, so fascinating presentation, so you’ve highlighted solar PV as a positive innovation to assist Indigenous and remote communities. So the question is, are there any other innovations that could make a real difference in these communities?
[Image changes to show Simon talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Simon Quilty: Yeah. So it’s interesting. So I flew into Merapi recently on an outreach and I saw a big solar farm and utilities like power and water are, are, are reaping the economic benefits of solar farms, but Aboriginal people are not getting access to rooftop solar and so some of our research that’s come out to be published was actually initiated by a Warramungu man on, I mean, the roof I showed you was a picture and he really wanted the panels, but couldn’t understand why he didn’t have access to them.
It’s been an interesting process but Bush Life did a lot of really interesting work and one of the things that really helps Indigenous people who have limited financial literacy was a, was a traffic light system to show them how to use energy more efficiently, but also doing energy audits and so when those panels went on to Norm Frank’s house, the first problem with Norm Frank’s house is it’s a Besser brick structure with a western-facing wall with no eaves on it and it heats up like a, an oven, and so he has five fridges in his house including one in his bedroom where he keeps his medication to protect it from all of the children because there’s about 20 kids in his house. So, I mean I think the answer’s housing and better quality, but I think that is an empty space from what I understand in the Territory.
[Image changes to show Stephen talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Stephen Cook: Great thanks Simon. So we might have time just for perhaps one or two more so perhaps to you Sharon again, so, so the app looks great. So just a question around how you’d improve the app at this point. So is it about more granular sensor data, or is it about sensor accuracy or the number of people actually collecting more data rather than the people actually using it to improve the app?
[Image changes to show Sharon talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Sharon Campbell: Yeah, I guess one of the things that we find is that, you know, air quality, especially, is, well the air quality readings are accurate, you know, the closer you are to an air quality monitoring station, the more accurate are. Once you’re more than about 3km away from an air quality monitoring station, those readings aren’t going to be particularly accurate. And that also depends on the topography of where you are, so if there’s lots of hill and valleys, they’re going to be less accurate again and so more air quality monitoring stations right around the country that cover population centres, so for example Alice Springs, air quality isn’t monitored at all.
So that’s the things that we’d like to see. That will actually make the app a lot better and make people a lot safer from their environmental conditions, give them a lot more information and allow them to make their decisions that they need to make to reduce their exposure. So that’s, that’d be the number one thing that if we had money, we would advocate for that, but I guess it’s also up to people in their local area to advocate for that as well, so you know, if you want to write to your local member for parliament, knock yourself out, because that’s the sort of things that they should be stepping up and doing as well.
[Image changes to show Stephen talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Stephen Cook: Great. Thanks Sharon. So I might just squeeze in one more on AirRater while I’ve got you, so just a question around does AirRater collect any personal information on how hard you’ve been working when experiencing say heat-stress symptoms?
[Image changes to show Sharon talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Sharon Campbell: Yep, no we don’t. So we only collect personal information, so very brief histories, so of, you know, whether you have any particular medical conditions that might be pertinent but we don’t collect anything about your workplace or your, or the way that you’re working, the type of work that you do that sort of thing, no. It’s and I should also add that yes, we collect information that’s private, but we do store it very carefully and the people that are able to see that information are very small people, a very small bunch of people that just research that information. Any publicly released information would be deidentified and aggregated.
[Image shows Fay talking in the Participant bar at the bottom while Sharon can be seen listening on the main screen]
Fay Johnston: Can I add something to that or are we out of time?
Stephen Cook: Yeah quickly.
[Image changes to show Fay talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Fay Johnston: Just, with AirRater, we have been able to show at a population level what drives lung symptoms, identify plants we didn’t realise were allergenic for example, because of the symptom reporting, identify how smoke makes allergic symptoms worse, but what we haven’t done and what we’re really keen to do through this project is to learn a bit about symptoms and heat as people experience them.
[Image changes to show Stephen talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Stephen Cook: Great, thanks very much everyone and thanks to all our speakers. So some really fascinating presentations, that really highlighted the challenge of managing heat and health in the Top End and potentially the role of AirRater, so I really enjoyed that. So we’re very interested to connect with people, so please follow us on the Darwin Living Lab website. You can join us there. So you can register to receive updates around future webinars and newsletters and so keep an eye out on what’s upcoming, but thanks a lot for your time today and as I said, we’ve recorded this. This will be available for you to share later on and we’ll post it on the Darwin Living website shortly, so appreciate your time and have a good afternoon. Thanks everyone.