Human health response to geomagnetic disturbances

Hiroshi Morimoto

geomagnetic storm, Kullback-Leibler, Jeffrey, myocardial infarction, acute heart failure, cerebral infarction.

The relationship between human health and variations in the Sun and in the Earth’s magnetic field could potentially have global implications. However, conflicting information exists regarding this issue because the solar activity has both positive and negative effects on human health. For example, solar activity provides a protective shield to the earth from cosmic rays and prevents our atmosphere from being eroded by solar wind. This work attempts to measure the impact of solar activity on human health, and to identify whether this impact on human health is positive (beneficial) or negative (detrimental).

   We used data on the daily number of calls to the ambulance service at Nagoya city in Japan, between 1955 and 2017. The patients were first taken to hospital by ambulance where an appropriate diagnosis was made. This data contained the number of patients with different diagnoses e.g., myocardial infarction, cerebral infarction etc.

   To identify the impacts of geomagnetic storms on human health (short-term effects), an informational analysis was conducted using the Kullback-Leibler information index and Jeffrey index, which measures the distance between distributions. We extended these notions to have a plus and a minus sign, the “signed Jeffrey index”, to indicate positive or negative effects due to solar activity respectively. We compared two groups of distributions of patients, one week before and after geomagnetic storms.

   The minus sign of the “signed Jeffrey index” was observed with incidences of myocardial infarctions and acute heart failures whereas the positive sign was observed with incidences of cerebral infarctions.

   These results suggest that geomagnetic storms and solar activity have both positive and negative short-term effects on human health that vary based on the type of diseases. Our informational methods could potentially contribute to illustrate the impact of geomagnetic storms against human health.

https://dx.doi.org/10.31873/IJEAS.7.09.13