Pathways to Healing

by Elaine Zablocki

Climate Change and Its Unrecognized Impact on Our Health

We’ve all heard stories about the potential effects of climate change; we’ve seen pictures of receding glaciers and polar bears stranded on shrinking ice floes. Now Paul R. Epstein, MD, and Dan Ferber have written Changing Climate, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It, the first book to focus on the close relationship between climate change and health.

For those of us committed to supporting vibrant human beings within the intricate web of a healthy natural environment, this book is a wake-up call. It pulls together data on the potential health effects of climate change, looking at many countries over the past 40 years. It shows us that climate change works in subtle ways to increase disease and limit the many essential factors that support health. It also highlights specific stories of individuals and communities who are finding ways to cope successfully with these problems.

The book emphasizes five main ways that climate change threatens our health:

1. Dangerous heat waves, which kill 1500 people a year in the US. In addition,

heat waves trigger heart attacks and other causes of death that aren’t counted as heat-related illnesses.

2. Infectious diseases. A warming climate allows mosquitoes and other disease-transmitting

animals to move to new locations. For example, mosquitoes that carry malaria have moved into

the East African highlands, which were once too cold for the mosquito to survive.

3. Asthma and allergies. Burning fossil fuels leads to increased respiratory disease, as tiny particles of soot from the tailpipes of diesel-burning vehicles penetrate tiny airways deep in the lung, triggering asthma attacks. Elevated carbon dioxide levels and warming mean that ragweed produces more potent pollen, and larger quantities of it, worsening allergies.

4. Extreme weather. Climate change means more wild and dangerous weather, like increasing ice storms and blizzards that injure or kill people in falls and car crashes. Heavy rainfall (more than 6 inches in a day) has increased 27% in the US since 1970, leading to devastating floods.

5. Diseases of trees and crops. The warming climate in the US and Canadian West has unleashed bark beetle infestations that have destroyed vast areas of forests, while a warmer, drier climate means larger, longer-burning forest fires. Smoke from these fires aggravates bronchitis and asthma and releases carcinogens.

Expanding Disease and Community Warning Systems

Climate change expands the range of infectious diseases, notes coauthor Dan Ferber, an award-winning science journalist. For example, the ticks that carry Lyme disease can only live within a certain range of temperature and humidity. “As the world warms areas further north and higher in the mountains have warmer temperatures, so the range of certain diseases is spreading,” he says. “The rate of Lyme disease in New Hampshire is about eight times what it was ten years ago. Lyme disease is moving north into eastern Canada where historically it was not present.”

Communities are responding by setting up “disease early warning systems” to detect outbreaks of disease and combat them through early, expanded public health measures. They’ve also set up heat wave early warning systems, which turn out to be very effective.

“You can predict a heat wave several days in advance and prepare for it,” Ferber says. “Alert people that they need to stay out of the midday sun and drink lots of water. During heat waves the people at greatest risk are shut-ins and disabled people who can’t get out of their hot apartments. When a volunteer van takes those people to an air-conditioned cooling center for the day, it saves lives. During 1995 a heat wave killed 750 people in Chicago. That same mass of hot muggy air moved into Philadelphia, but that city had a community-based cooling system in place, and only 18 people died.”

Health Practitioners Speak Out on Climate Change

In recent years, many associations of health professionals have spoken publicly about the importance of climate change and its effects on health. Sarah Bucic, MSN, RN, testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works as a representative of the American Nurses Association. She summarized the health effects of climate change and its related pollution in terms of increasing hospital admissions and health-care costs. “For nurses, these aren’t just numbers,” she added. “They are our patients. We see them in the emergency room on bad air days, struggling to breathe.”

During a news briefing last February Georges Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called climate change “one of the greatest public health challenges we face. … Public health and medicine follow the science, and the evidence has only grown stronger,” he said. “Climate change can lead to extreme weather events, putting the health of elderly, sick and vulnerable populations at greater risk.”

At the same briefing, Cecil Wilson, MD, president of the American Medical Association, pointed out that over the past three decades, “poor air quality has extended the allergy and asthma season in this country by about 28 days and asthma rates have doubled. … Dengue fever, a condition that has been rarely seen in this country, has now appeared in my home state of Florida,” he said. “The American Medical Association is working to ensure that physicians and other health-care professionals understand the basis for climate change and the rise in climate-related illness so they can prepare and respond to this challenge.”

The Catholic Health Association of the United States, an association not-for-profit hospitals and health systems with a faith-based ministry, has completed a year-long effort to raise awareness about global climate change. Their brochure on the subject says: “the universal nature of climate change reminds us that we are all in this together. We hold the Earth in common and must act together to help our brothers, our sisters and ourselves. As a health ministry we have an obligation to care for all creation and to be good stewards of the Earth.”

Potential for Change

Given that climate change has potentially devastating effects, it’s surprising that public reaction has been so muted.“One reason is that human beings aren’t great at dealing with long-term processes,” Ferber says. “Sometimes these effects develop gradually over time, so they can be difficult to see.” One of the authors’ reasons for writing this book is to help people become more aware of the long-term results of climate change. “ I want to emphasize the importance of people taking appropriate actions now,” Ferber adds. “We have to convince our legislators and other policy-makers that it is urgently important to move to a low-carbon economy. None of us are bystanders.”

Paul R. Epstein, MD, MPH, is the associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. For the past 30 years he has worked in medical, teaching and research roles in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In his introduction to the book he describes the filthy streets and contaminated water of Dickens’s London … and the way civic leaders of that time mobilized to build water purification plants and sanitary systems that systematically addressed the root causes of disease. “Today, climate change poses health risks even more profound than those posed by poor sanitation and living conditions in 19th-century London,” he writes. “Will we grasp the interconnected nature of these threats and seek solutions that get to the root of the problem? … Just as an ailing patient can recover, so can an ailing planet. But we must act now.”

Resources

Epstein PR, Ferber D. Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It. University of California Press; 2011. http://www.changingplanetchanginghealth.com.

The Center for Health and The Global Environment: http://chge.med.harvard.edu. The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School was founded in 1996 to promote a wider understanding of the human health consequences of global environmental change. Its website is loaded with interesting information and links to specific programs, including a scientific review of the connections between human health and biodiversity, a section on healthful/sustainable food, materials for classroom education, and an effort to bring together environmental scientists and evangelical Christians.

The Catholic Health Association of the US has a variety of educational materials on its website, as well as links to other organizations working on climate change:

http://www.chausa.org/Climate_Change.

http://www.chausa.org/Environmental_Responsibility.

Elaine Zablocki has been a freelance health-care journalist for more than 20 years. She was the editor of Alternative Medicine Business News and CHRF News Files. She writes regularly for many health-care publications.