4th large Bodele outbreak since Saturday -- impact on human health likely but unknown. Monitoring/communication required!!

Tuesday noon dust identification over North Africa.  

This morning, the 4th large dust outbreak erupted from Chad this morning and has entered eastern Niger, Chad and soon Nigeria and Cameroon.   As mentioned earlier, the anomalous flow across the desert has triggered these dust events.  Nearly all of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast have been impacted.   Millions have been under unhealthy to hazardous air quality from high concentrations of PM2.5.   In the next two days, the dust will move westward and emerge off the coast of West Africa.  In the process, many more people from Mali to Cabo Verde may experience very poor air quality and airports will be subject to poor visibiity.

Identification of dust outbreaks on Sat (Red), Sunday (Green) and Monday (Purple)

Communicating these large and long-exposure hazards is required, especially that many countries having low public health capacity, a growing population and limited access to income.  It has been estimated that there are 780,000 premature deaths due to pollution and desert dust is the primary contributor.  Recently we published a paper (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GH000214)  showing that desert dust is very high in Senegal and respiratory disease is also very high.   My good friend Karin recently published a paper showing how lung cells are destroyed in dusty environments (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935119306887?via%3Dihub)

and it may be the reason why lung-cancer is relatively high in Senegal, even for non-smokers.  

Communication requires real-time access to data for the public.  Currently, the amount of surface data available for any decisionmaker including an asthmatic person is not sufficient in Africa.   If you go to http://aqicn.org/map/world/ you would only see one station with real-time data in West Africa which is Bamako.  My colleagues in Senegal put out a daily bulletin about air quality conditions each day for the Dakar region.  But there are far too many places that receive no information.  

Over the past year, there are some in the community that using low-cost sensors (200-300 USD) to try and provide real-time data.  While these instruments cannot be compared to 100,000 USD state of the art equipment, they provide a measure of air quality and are used all around the globe.   The purple air sensors are a great example of this (https://www.purpleair.com/map). 

Since, June we are trying to build a network in West Africa (Senegal, Cape Verde, Angola...) but simple things such as continuous wifi and electricity make it a challenge.  We are working on solutions for those.  When there are dust events such as the current one, there is a need to know locally what happening.  But really it is hospitals, decisionmakers and the public that really need the information locally.    So the most populous nation in West Africa, Nigeria does not have enough local monitoring of PM to protect its population during the dry season.  

Purple Air Network, Tuesday, February 11, 2020

If this is 2020 and we really want to have clear vision, we need to use innovation to help solve the current set of environmental problems.  But communication and protecting the public against predictable hazards such as dust outbreaks is within reach.  We just need to commit to the right action.