By Gerry T. Estrera
“Climate change endangers human health.” – Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization
Climate change manifests itself in ways far beyond a slowly rising global mean surface temperature. Scientific data is making the public increasingly aware that a changing climate has significant potential consequences for public health.
“The biggest global health threat of the 21st century” – that is how The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, called climate change, which is caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“Climate change has become the greatest humanitarian challenge of our time,” Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate Committee on Climate Change, told the participants of the recent Social Good Summit in Makati. “It also threatens public health.”
Scientists say that as earth’s thermostat continues to climb, human health problems will only become more frequent. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the average atmospheric temperature rose by about 1 degree Fahrenheit.
“By 2000, that increase was responsible for the annual loss of about 160,000 lives and the loss of 5.5 million years of healthy life,” deplores the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO).
The United Nations health agency expects the toll to double to about 300,000 lives and 11 million years of healthy life by 2020.
“The warming of the planet will be gradual, but the effects of extreme weather events will be abrupt and acutely felt,” said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan. “Both trends can affect some of the most fundamental determinants of health: air, water, food, shelter and freedom from disease.”
Here are some examples of what’s has already happened around the world as a result of climate change:
· During the past two decades, the prevalence of asthma in the United States has quadrupled, in part because of climate-related factors. For Caribbean islanders, respiratory irritants come in dust clouds that emanate from Africa’s expanding deserts and are then swept across the Atlantic by trade winds, which have accelerated due to warmer ocean temperatures.
· Starting in August 2003, heat waves caused more than 14,800 deaths in France. Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom all reported excess mortality during the same period, with total deaths in the range of 35,000. In France, deaths were massively reported for people aged 75 and over (60 percent).
· Six young men and boys were killed by fatal parasites in 2007 at Lake Havasu, Arizona, after they swam in water infested with a heat-loving amoeba. In 2008, scientists found that poison ivy vines have grown 10 times denser near Savannah, Georgia over the last 20 years. Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes poison ivy to grow larger and produce stronger irritants, they reported.
· Smog-related deaths from climate change are projected to increase by about 4.5 percent from the 1990s to the 2050s, according to studies at Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities. A scientist at Yale University, Michelle Bell, looked at the 50 largest cities in eastern United States and found that the health-alert days would go up by 68 percent over the next decades.
· Mosquitoes and the diseases they carry including malaria, dengue fever, Ross River virus, and West Nile virus are especially sensitive to temperature changes and land elevation. Mosquitoes that carry malaria were found at never-before-seen elevations on Mount Kenya in 2006. Malaria has also been detected in new higher-elevation areas in Indonesia. Mosquitoes that can carry dengue fever viruses were previously limited to elevations of 3,300 feet but recently appeared at 7,200 feet in the Andes Mountains of Colombia.
The Philippines ranks sixth in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index by Maplecroft, a United Kingdom-based global risk and strategic consulting firm. The country is also listed third in the World Risk Index by the United Nations.
“Adopting a public health approach to climate change is feasible and acceptable especially today, as current government efforts toward universal health care are clearly compatible with the goal of strengthening health systems in order to ensure health protection and health equity in an era of global climate change,” pointed out Dr. Ramon Lorenzo Luis R. Guinto, consultant on migration health for the International Organization on Migration and the Department of Health.
“As one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, it is our best interest to develop evidence-based climate-risk adaptation policies, strategies, and technologies,” said Dr. Rodel Lasco, a member of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Dr. Lasco said that climate change is seen to aggravate extreme events like heavy precipitation and tropical cyclones. Extreme rainfall is projected to increase in Luzon and Visayas in 2010 and 2050.
According to Dr. Guinto, climate change exposes human health to risks like malaria, diarrhea, meningitis, dengue fever, floods and cyclones, drought, airborne dispersion of hazardous materials, heat stress, ultraviolet radiation, pollens and air pollution.
The figures of those who die from climate-sensitive diseases are startling: 3.5 million from under nutrition, 2.2 million from diarrhea, and another 2.2 million from malaria. Extreme weather events kill 60,000. These statistics were released by the UN health agency.
In an editorial, Vital Signs said: “Outside these figures, one only needs to look outside his window to see the glaring effects of climate change. Back then, it would take a really strong typhoon lasting days for the streets of Manila to become flooded. Nowadays, just a few hours of rainfall will submerge our streets.
“There is an unmistakable yellow haze looming ominously above us, covering the various Metro skylines,” the editorial further went on. “The haze is a product of smoke-belching vehicles, coupled with the scorching heat of the sun. Being subjected to one of the worst levels of air pollution in the world, residents of Metro Manila are highly prone to develop respiratory and other pollution-related diseases.”
Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper has busy days ahead. Approximately 600, 000 deaths occurred worldwide as a result of weather-related natural disasters in the 1990s; some 95 percent of these were in poor countries. According to the Oxfam report (November 2007), the average number of natural disasters per year during early 1980s was about 120. Now, the number has increased to nearly 500.
“Without urgent action through changes in human lifestyle, the effects of this phenomenon on the global climate system could be abrupt or even irreversible, sparing no country and causing more frequent and more intense heat waves, rain storms, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level,” warned Dr. Shigeru Omi, the Asian regional WHO director.
0 Comments
Oldest