On this Tuesday, May 4, episode of Sundial,
Climate Change's Effect On Seniors
There’s been a big focus over the last year on the dangers posed to the senior population by the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s also a more insidious danger facing them in the years to come — sea level rise and hurricanes.
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“What we found out in talking to people for this story is that there are a lot of problems with care for the elderly in Florida and across the U.S. They have a saying about disasters — they magnify the fault lines that already exist. So, when you have seniors who are frail, have co-morbidities, and other problems already, and you put them in a stressful situation, they just don't do as well,” said WLRN’s environmental reporter Jenny Staletovich.
A new WLRN investigation, based on a report from the nonprofit news service Climate Central, examines the steps taken by nursing homes and assisted living facilities to prepare for rising seas and increasingly powerful storms.
An instance of this was in 2017, when 12 residents at the Hollywood Hills nursing facility died in the days after Hurricane Irma. The storm cut the power in the facility, leaving residents in melting heat.
“One big thing that changed after the Hollywood Hills tragedy is a generator requirement so that eldercare facilities must be able to provide power for a certain number of days and hours after a storm. You have these facilities that are installing these very, very expensive generators, but they're on the ground floor … what good is investing in generators if they're going to flood?” said WLRN Broward County reporter Caitie Switalski Muñoz.
You can read more of their reporting here.
Vaccine Hesitancy in Palm Beach County
As more COVID-19 variants continue to spread, and daily vaccination rates are drop, the hopes for herd immunity seem unlikely. Now the goal for public health experts is to get the most vulnerable protected from the virus.
“Suddenly there was just such a drastic drop in the amount of folks that were requesting the vaccine. A few weeks back, we had one event on one Saturday where we inoculated over 500 people. Ever since the pause for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine announcement came, that's drastically dropped. This past weekend, we had an event at a mobile home in a local community where only 55 people signed up to be inoculated,” said Chris Irizarry, the chief operating officer of FoundCare, a non-profit healthcare organization in Palm Beach County providing free and income-based services for predominantly lower-income families.
They’ve been hosting free vaccine clinics across the county for the past several months.
“Our organization is well trusted and well respected in the community. We're starting to now ramp up our outreach efforts. This sudden drop only happened this past week. Now, we're obviously moving our organization to a position where we're going to increase our outreach efforts and get people out there to really realize and understand the need for this [vaccine],” Irizarry said.
Stingrays Snacking
The crunching sounds of sting rays chewing through the shells of mussels, clams and sea snails are the center of a new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University.
They captured these sounds using a camera with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone.
It's not only an ASMR sensation. It could also help conservation efforts and be useful for future underwater research.
The next step would be to incorporate these microphones into animal-borne devices, something an animal can wear.
"This is something we've been doing with other devices, such as accelerometers, which are basically like Fitbit for these animals. And being able to now incorporate sound in there is a tremendous win for us because we can figure out potentially what these animals are eating as they're kind of swimming around and doing their normal thing," said Matt Ajemian, who led the study and is an assistant research professor at FAU’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.
The white-spotted eagle ray is a protected species in Florida. But the species is classified endangered globally by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
