Climate change is the biggest health threat facing doctors this century, the first medical assessment of the dangers of global warming has warned.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 14 May 09;
Until now the medical profession has not taken a position on climate change, considering issues such as world poverty, HIV and bird flu to be more pressing threats to human health.
However, a study by the University College London, published in the Lancet, concluded that the problems caused by climate change such as food shortages, heat waves and increased threat of tropical diseases such as malaria will kill billions of people.
I means climate change is now the biggest threat to humanity.
"Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century," the authors including doctors, climatologists and economists concluded.
"Effects of climate change will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives of and well-being of billions of people at increased risk."
The year-long study predicted temperature rises during the next century are likely to rise by more than 3.6F (2C) bring about catastrophic consequences.
The health of people in poorer countries such as Bangladesh will be worst affected because they do not have the money to respond to events like flooding, crop failure and an increase in insect-borne diseases such as dengue fever and malaria.
However, the report said, developed countries will also be affected. Extreme weather events will be more frequent across the world and rises in temperature will cause problems for the elderly and vulnerable.
Mass migration and even war caused by food and water shortages will cause health problems like starvation and the threat of disease.
Doctors even fear climate change will have a "psychosocial" effect on health with patients requiring counselling over the fear of global warming and the effects it will have.
Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, said doctors have been "silent for too long about the importance of climate change to the future of health services".
"It is an urgent threat, it is a dangerous threat, it is immediate and requires an unprecedented response by Government and international organisations," he said.
Doctors around the world are being urged to become advocates for encouraging a "low carbon lifestyle", for example by cycling rather than taking a car. Not only to tackle global warming but obesity, heart disease, asthma, diabetes and other conditions associated with a sedentary lifestyle.
The paper also called on world Governments cut emissions and invest in helping poorer countries to adapt to climate change so that deaths are minimised.
Climate change diagnosed as biggest global health threat
Catherine Brahic, New Scientist 14 May 09;
"We have been ignoring the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." This was the message – or maybe confession – spelled out in a report launched by doctors and climatologists in London on Wednesday morning.
Over the coming century, climate change will worsen virtually every health problem we know of, from heart disease and heatstroke to salmonella and insect-borne infectious diseases.
"The health sector has in the past not only underestimated but completely neglected and ignored the issues," said Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. "This has not been an issue on the agenda of any professional body in health over the last 10 years in any significant way." The Lancet commissioned the report from a panel of specialists at University College London.
Number one priority
The doctors said they felt the tide was turning, however. "It is true that the health sector is beginning to wake up to this," said Hugh Montgomery, director of UCL's Institute for Human Health and Performance. He cited the UK's Royal College of Physicians, whose president has made climate change "pretty much its number one priority".
Anthony Costello, director of UCL's Institute for Global Health, said that helping to write the report had been a personal wake-up call. "Eighteen months ago, I felt there were other priorities," he said. "I thought infant mortality was a much more immediate risk to the developing countries I visited, and thought climate change was something in the distance."
"I hadn't fully understood how a change of 2 °C – which seems like a pleasant summer afternoon – has such implications for ecosystems, for water, for storm damage." Costello said the report alerted him up to the fact that the world is facing a global crisis. "I want to retain some optimism. If we do act now, we can we can hold back this crisis."
Clear and present danger
Every society has a range of temperatures within which it can cope, the researchers said. Outside that range, infrastructures become overloaded. A classic example was the 2003 European heatwave, which killed up to 70,000 people. Yet by 2040, Europe's average summer temperatures will equal those it experienced in 2003.
The doctors and researchers listed shortages of water and food, along with war and ecological collapse, as the most pressing health threats posed by climate change.
Climate and health researchers have previously pointed out the health effects of climate change. Infectious diseases like malaria and dengue are expected to spread, and kidney stones could become more frequent.
In the US and Australia, drought has already contributed to a spread of water-borne illnesses by forcing people to collect and store water in tanks for longer than they otherwise would. In India, hospital deaths have risen in recent weeks as the nation battles a heatwave.
Doctors' predicament
The message does not appear to have filtered through to the foot soldiers of human health: the family doctors and health policy-makers whose job it is to save lives.
"Think of the average general practitioner," said Mark Maslin, a climatologist at UCL. Between short appointments and struggling to keep up with medical journals, they have little time to factor climate change into their long list of responsibilities.
"This report says the medical profession has to wake up," said Maslin. "Pulling our hair out, saying we're all going to die horribly does not save lives."
Journal reference: The Lancet vol 373, p 1693
Doctors' health warning on climate change
Yahoo News 13 May 09;
PARIS (AFP) – Climate change will present the greatest threat to health this century, amplifying the risk of disease, malnutrition and homelessness through floods, drought and rising sea levels, a medical panel said on Thursday.
"Even the most conservative estimates are profoundly disturbing and demand action," said the report, compiled over a year by The Lancet medical journal and experts from the Institute for Global Health at University College London.
"Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century."
The commission drew much of its data from the landmark Fourth Assessment Report, issued in 2007 by the UN's Nobel-winning climate experts, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Changing weather patterns could widen the habitat of disease-bearing mosquitoes, bringing malaria and dengue to previously cold regions, while flooding in poor countries will be a boon for cholera and other water-borne diseases.
Indirect effects on health include malnutrition as a result of poor harvests; injury and death from storms; and vulnerability from migration, as populations flee swamped delta cities or civil unrest.
"Estimates show that small increases in the risk for climate-sensitive conditions, such as diarrhoea and malnutrition, could result in very large increases in the total disease burden," it said.
Poor countries that are least to blame for global warming will be hit most, "a source of historical shame to our generation if nothing is done to address it," the authors said.
