Future generations will face greater health problems due to climate change
Children are growing
up in a warmer world that will hit them with more and different health
problems than their parents experienced, an international report by
doctors said.
With increasing
diarrhea diseases, more dangerous heat waves, air pollution and
increases in mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and malaria,
man-made global warming is already harming public health around the
world, the annual climate change and health report from the medical
journal said.
But the report and
its authors said they worry that the future health of the world’s
youngest people will get even grimmer if emissions of heat-trapping
gases aren’t curbed.
“A child born today
as they go through their lives they are going to be increasingly exposed
to more and more harms that I did not experience,” said study co-author
Dr Renee Salas, a Boston emergency room physician and professor at
Harvard.
“I cannot think of a greater health emergency,” Salas said.
Already, the number of days when conditions are ripe for the spread of the water-borne bacteria Vibiro,
a major cause of debilitating diarrhoea, have doubled since 1980 with
last year ranking second-highest on record, the report said. Because of
the warming climate, 29 percent more of the U.S. coastline is vulnerable
to Vibrio. The report also said the cholera version of Vibrio has
increased by nearly 10 percent.
Nine of the top 10 years where conditions were most ripe for dengue fever transmission have occurred since 2000, the report said.
Those diseases hit children harder, the report said. And children, the elderly, the poor and the sick are most hurt during extreme heat with dangerous overheating, respiratory disease and kidney problems.
“Children are the
most vulnerable. They will bear the vast majority of the burden of
climate change,’’ said Dr Nick Watts, an Australian emergency room
physician and the lead author of the global report. “Their health will
be hit by climate change in a profoundly different way.”
While medicine and
public health have improved over the decades, allowing people to live
longer, climate change “threatens to undermine all of the gains we’ve
had,” Salas said.
Dr Cindy Parker, an
environmental health professor at Johns Hopkins University, praised the
peer-reviewed report, which she wasn’t part of, but she worried that
focusing on the health effects that have already happened lessens the
urgency of the future.
“Climate change is a
risk amplifier,” Parker said in an email. So as bad as the health
problems are, add in water and food shortages caused by climate change
and there will be more social unrest and conflict around the world that
will still hit the United States in indirect ways, she said.
As an emergency room
doctor, Salas said diseases that spread farther because of a changing
climate, such as Lyme Disease, are something she has to consider when
she treats patients.
During an emergency
room shift in July, Salas saw an elderly man during a heatwave with a
body temperature of 106 degrees. The ambulance crew said he lived on the
top floor of a public housing complex with no air conditioning and when
they opened the door “there was this wave of heat that hit them.”
Salas was able to
save him. But as a doctor, she struggles with cases where there is no
way to treat the patient, such as with devastating bleeding inside the
brain. With climate change health problems, she said, the remedy is
stopping emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil
and gas.
“We can’t ‘doctor’
our way out of this,” said Dr Georges Benjamin, executive director of
the American Public Health Association, who wasn’t part of the study but
praised it. “We must address the root causes of climate change.”