A “spare the air” advisory is in effect through Sunday attributable to moderate to unhealthy air quality across the Bay Area.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District issued a warning Sunday morning prohibiting residents and businesses from burning wood or logs indoors and outdoors.

Air Quality Index forecasts show conditions are unhealthy for sensitive groups on the Peninsula, Santa Clara Valley, northern Alameda County, western Contra Costa County and parts of the North Bay. Much of the remaining of the Bay Area experiences temperate conditions.

“Regional wood burning and easterly winds carrying air pollution from the Central Valley to the Bay Area have contributed to high overnight concentrations of particulate matter and unhealthy air quality,” the agency said in a news release Sunday.

Cool temperatures and light-weight winds prevented mixing of what National Weather Service meteorologist Karleisa Rogacheski called an “accumulation of cooler air” beneath a layer of warmer air. These weather conditions also help trap smoke from wood burners near homes and increase the buildup of pollutants, in accordance with the air quality district.

Conditions are expected to enhance barely as northerly winds pick up throughout the afternoon and evening, although unhealthy levels will proceed, in accordance with BAAQMD. Forecasts say more significant improvements are expected on Monday attributable to windier northeasterly winds.

“We've already seen an improvement in visibility – fog and haze – because winds and temperatures were at the same level,” Rogacheski said. “Tomorrow there will be stronger winds that could help increase fog or keep it fog-free.”

Originally published: December 8, 2024 at 11:20 am PST

A “spare the air” warning for the Bay Area and a heat warning for the Peninsula coast were prolonged through Sunday, and temperatures rose to record highs Saturday in Oakland and San Rafael, the Bay Area Air Management District and National Weather said Service announced on Saturday.

Homeless residents, elderly residents, children and pets are prone to heat-related illnesses, with those lacking effective cooling or adequate hydration at biggest risk, the weather service statement said.

“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun and check on relatives and neighbors. Under no circumstances should small children and pets be left unattended in vehicles,” says the warning, which also recommends scheduling strenuous outdoor activities for early morning or late evening.

The warning initially warned of high temperatures from the East Bay, South Bay and eastern San Mateo County south to the Santa Cruz Mountains, southern Salinas Valley, interior Monterey County and San Benito County.

On Saturday evening, National Weather Service meteorologist Dial Hoang said Sunday temperatures across the region would likely peak within the afternoon, reaching around 99 degrees in San Jose, 96 in Palo Alto, 91 in Oakland, 102 in Walnut Creek and Concord and would reach 88 degrees in downtown San Francisco.

Less extreme temperatures are expected in Santa Cruz: around 85 degrees downtown and cooler on the beach, within the mid to upper 70s. At Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek within the Santa Cruz Mountains, temperatures will likely rise above 101 degrees, Hoang said.

Later Sunday afternoon and evening, the South Bay and Peninsula could cool barely because of an onshore flow of cooler air from the coast, Hoang said.

On Saturday, the mercury skyrocketed near downtown Oakland on the Oakland Museum, surpassing the all-time high of 96 degrees set in 1987, the National Weather Service reported. San Rafael reached 106, dramatically breaking the previous record of 94 set in 2014. The 99 degrees in Redwood City matched the town's record set in 1987, the weather service reported, noting that the records were tentative and still being confirmed would must be.

San Rafael is anticipated to chill down on Sunday, with highs near 100 degrees within the afternoon, said Hoang of the weather service.

Temperature records previously set in 1985 were broken Thursday in San Jose (101 degrees) and Salinas (99). On the identical day, King City (103 degrees) broke a record set in 1980. San Jose broke previous records again Friday with temperatures of 98 degrees, two degrees higher than the previous record of 96 degrees set in 1987.

The “spare the air” alert issued from Saturday to Sunday, warning that public ozone pollution is anticipated to achieve unhealthy levels, is the 14th this 12 months and the sixth in per week.

The heat wave is anticipated to ease in the approaching week. “We start to see some relief on Monday,” Hoang said, adding that temperatures should return to seasonal normals by Tuesday.

A high within the mid-90s is anticipated for San Jose on Monday, with Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Walnut Creek and Concord reaching the upper 90s. Temperatures within the high 80s are expected in Oakland.

Originally published: October 5, 2024 at 2:37 p.m

As a massive heatwave was preparing to settle within the Bay Area just in time for the vacation, and the prospect of polluted air was there too.

That threat was enough on Monday for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to issue a “Spare the Air” warning for a minimum of Tuesday.

The warning is the third in 2024; the opposite two occurred back to back in mid-June.

Whether it is a sign of a series of days with harmful air quality will likely depend upon developments off the coast, officials said.

“It really depends on the intensity of the winds off the ocean,” said air district spokeswoman Tina Landis. “It's very likely that this could be the case every day, but we can't say for sure. Some of those winds could blow some of the pollution away.”

According to the county, concentrations of ground-level ozone will likely be harmful to health. Young children, seniors and folks with respiratory and heart conditions could experience difficulty respiration in the event that they go outside, officials said.

“It’s getting worse as the day goes on,” Landis said.

A high pressure bubble is forming, causing a protracted heat wave that can affect the region until July 4th and into the weekend. Temperatures of as much as 42 degrees are expected inland. According to meteorologists, the high pressure is trapping pollutants.

The district urged people to make money working from home, use public transportation, or walk or bike to work to scale back smog.

Inside every human lives a thriving zoo of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microscopic organisms, collectively referred to as the microbiome. The digestive tract alone is home to trillions of microbes, a menagerie estimated to incorporate greater than 1,000 species.

This ecosystem of tiny things affects our health in ways in which science is just starting to know. It facilitates digestion, metabolism, immune response, and far more. But when a serious infection occurs, probably the most powerful antibiotics are merciless: They destroy colonies of useful bacteria within the digestive tract and infrequently result in secondary health problems.

“Researchers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of protecting the human gut microbiome, particularly because its integrity and diversity is linked to metabolic influences on mental and physical health,” said Oladele A. Ogunseitan, Ph.D., professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine.

Drug-resistant germs are develop faster as latest drugs are developed, rendering the present arsenal of medication increasingly ineffective. But the more we understand in regards to the microbiome, the clearer it becomes that we want antibiotics that specifically goal the disease.

With this goal in mind, a chemistry team on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is experimenting with a compound that goals to deal with each problems. The antibiotic lolamicin successfully defeated several drug-resistant pathogens in mice while sparing the animals' microbiome. The results were published within the journal Nature.

“It was only recently that it was recognized that killing these [beneficial] “Bacteria have many harmful effects on patients,” said Paul J. Hergenrother, a chemistry professor on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who co-led the study. “We have been interested for some time in finding antibiotics that are effective without killing the good bacteria.”

Worldwide, Antimicrobial resistance kills an estimated 1.27 million people directly annually and contributes to the deaths of thousands and thousands more.

Not all gram-negative bacteria make us sick. The bacterial populations in the common human gut could be roughly divided into gram-negative and gram-positive types, says Kristen Munoz, a former doctoral student on the University of Illinois who co-led the study.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics can't tell which bacteria to spare, she said, so any agent strong enough to treat a serious infection will “wipe out a lot of your gut microbiome,” she said, despite the fact that it's “not doing anything bad.”

The team focused its seek for a brand new drug on compounds that suppress the Lol system, which transports lipoproteins between the inner and outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria.

The genetic code of the Lol system looks different in harmful bacteria than in useful ones. This suggested to the researchers that drugs targeting the Lol system would have the option to differentiate good bacteria from bad ones.

The team developed several versions of those Lol-inhibiting compounds, and one in every of them proved particularly effective when tested against 130 drug-resistant strains of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterobacter cloacae.

They tested this antibiotic, which they called lolamicin, on mice infected with drug-resistant strains of sepsis or pneumonia. All of the mice with sepsis survived after receiving lolamicin, as did 70% of the mice with pneumonia.

To measure the effect on gut bacteria, the researchers gave healthy mice either lolamicin, a placebo, or one in every of two common antibiotics, amoxicillin and clindamycin. After collecting stool samples, they examined the animals' feces seven, ten, and 31 days after treatment.

In mice treated with amoxicillin or clindamycin, the variety of useful bacteria was lower and the gut bacteria were less diverse. In contrast, the center of mice treated with lolamycin gave the impression to be largely the identical.

“It was exciting to see that lolamicin did not cause any real changes in the microbiome, whereas the other antibiotics used clinically did,” Munoz said.

A disrupted microbiome can have immediate consequences for people battling an infection. When useful microbes are decimated, dangerous bacteria have less competition and secondary infections can spread.

Clostridium difficile is a notorious opportunistic pathogen, so the researchers conducted an experiment wherein they exposed mice treated with lolamicin, amoxicillin, or clindamycin to C. difficile. The mice that received standard antibiotics soon became infected with C. difficile. The lolamicin mice showed little to no infection.

The lab hopes to in the future test lolamicin or a version of it in clinical trials, Hergenrother said. (Munoz earned her PhD last yr and now works as a research analyst in Los Angeles.) But the drug remains to be in its infancy. While the concept of a targeted antibiotic is a welcome development, significant hurdles still must be overcome before it will possibly make a difference for patients.

“Distinguishing a so-called 'bad virus' from a so-called 'good virus' is not always as easy as it seems,” said Dr. Sean Spencer, a gastroenterologist and physician at Stanford University who was not involved within the research.

Some useful bacteria within the gut show a striking genetic similarity to harmful pathogens, he said. Others are harmless in some contexts and dangerous in others: “In a seriously ill person, a good germ can do bad things.”

Years can pass between a brand new antibiotic's proof of concept and its launch available on the market, and the overwhelming majority never make it to the top of that pipeline. It's also not clear how easily or how quickly bacteria develop resistance, which is maybe the most important obstacle facing lolamicin or any latest antibiotic.

“One of the biggest problems is that bacteria are so smart. You can attack a specific protein system or protein target in bacteria, but they will quickly find a resistance mechanism,” Munoz said. “They just have so many inherent mechanisms to overcome antibiotics.”