Report: Climate change is making people sicker
One doctor calls it a ‘sobering realization that we’re going completely in the wrong direction.’
A new report from the medical journal The Lancet indicates that climate-related health problems are increasing.
“Rising temperatures are having consequences,” Kristie Ebi, an environmental health professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of the annual report commissioned by the London-based journal, told the Associated Press.
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The Lancet Countdown report, titled “Code Red for a Healthy Future,” includes two versions: an international one and one for the United States. It tracks 44 indicators connected to climate changes such as heat deaths, infectious disease, and hunger. Indeed, as the report notes, not only is climate change “worsening heat waves, amplifying droughts, intensifying wildfires, supercharging hurricanes, and fueling flood risk,” but it also “increases pollen levels that worsen allergic and respiratory conditions, and climate-driven increases in temperature and precipitation make it easier to spread waterborne diseases that cause gastrointestinal illness.”
“Code Red is not even a hot enough color for this report,” Dr. Michele Barry, a tropical medicine professor at Stanford University (who was not involved with the report), told the AP. “This … is the sobering realization that we’re going completely in the wrong direction.”
If that sounds alarmist, consider that more than 200 medical journals issued a joint statement earlier this year claiming climate change is the “greatest threat” to global public health and called on world leaders to cut heat-trapping emissions to avoid “catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”
Authors of The Lancet report state “there is no safe global temperature rise from a health perspective. … All of us have been or likely will be affected by climate change, with some hazards more easily recognizable than others.” They add that Black, Latin, Asian, and Native populations “bear a greater burden” of health risks related to climate change.
The U.S. version of the report focuses on extreme heat, droughts, and wildfires, and it concludes with a call to action for policymakers to account for the health costs of fossil fuel burning (which causes global warming) and to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions — particularly in areas with high levels of fossil-fuel-related air pollution.
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