Glocally Comprehensive Health Watch at High Altitude

Background: On 1 August 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, and billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. A coronal mass ejection (CME) headed directly for Earth. The huge solar storm triggered unusual northern and southern auroras appearing on the night of August 3. Geomagnetic turbulence in Japan was observed on 4 August. The CME could have driven disastrous flooding occurring in Ladakh on 5 and 6 August 2010 in association with an annual acrophase of environmental temperature recorded by us there and also reported in Pakistan and in Gansu, China. A heat wave and smog were presumably associated with the CME in Moscow on 2-9 August. Aim: A chronoecologic health watch in Ladakh, using "glocal comprehensive assessment (GCA)" to study the human circulation, autonomic nervous system activity and health quality as a physiological system at high altitude, complements a chronoecological study in Japanese towns. Ladakh is a very arid region of east Kashmir, adjacent to Tibet, at an altitude of 2500 to 4600 m between the Karakoram and the Himalaya ranges. Subjects: 3418 Ladakh residents, i.e., 549, 461, 447, 164, 788, 420 and 589 citizens, were checked out annually since 2004 to 2010, respectively. High-altitude environments have less oxygen, lower pressure, cold temperature and strong UV-radiation. From June 2009 to September 2011, we monitored, every 30-min, among other data, air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, wind direction, wind speed, rainfall, upward/downward long/short wave radiation and UVradiation investigated in chronomic serial sections with a 24-hour and a separate 7-day cosine fit. Results: Disastrous floods on 5 August followed the CME on 1 August 2010, seen in serial sections of rainfall. Meteorological observation disclosed a disruption of 1/f fractal scaling of the environmental temperature before the floods in Ladakh, whereas serial sections showed the circannual acrophase. Annual Health Watch shows, as compared to Japanese subjects, that residents in Ladakh slept less (7.8 vs. 6.9 hours, p