Watching medical dramas on TV, one would assume that the great advances in medicine of the last century or so are mostly the result of heroic, intrepid Doctors and Health professionals, saving lives and stamping out disease. One would be wrong.
The biggest advances in human well being have come from simple public health measures, including modern water and food systems, better education, and vaccines. Much of this critical public health infrastructure is under threat from fossil fuel burning and climate change.
The Lancet, a leading UK medical journal, has the study.
Climate change poses such a threat to public health it risks undoing the gains of the last 50 years, a major study has found.
The Lancet Commission on climate change and health has found the threat continues to be underestimated, but that tackling it could be a huge opportunity to improve global health.
“The effects of climate change are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health,” said the report published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.
“The direct effects of climate change include increased heat stress, floods, drought, and increased frequency of intense storms, with the indirect threatening population health through adverse changes in air pollution, the spread of disease, food insecurity and under-nutrition, displacement, and mental ill health.”
Last year, the World Health Organisation predicted that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some top international doctors and public health experts have issued an urgent prescription for a feverish planet Earth: Get off coal as soon as possible.Substituting cleaner energy worldwide for coal will reduce air pollution and give Earth a better chance at avoiding dangerous climate change, recommended a global health commission organized by the prestigious British medical journal Lancet. The panel said hundreds of thousands of lives each year are at stake and global warming “threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health.”
It’s like a cigarette smoker with lung problems: Doctors can treat the disease, but the first thing that has to be done is to get the patient to stop smoking, or in this case get off coal in the next five years, commission officials said in interviews.
“The prescription for patient Earth is that we’ve got a limited amount of time to fix things,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London. “We’ve got a real challenge particularly with carbon pollution.”
He called it a “medical emergency” that could eventually dwarf the deadly toll of HIV in the 1980s. He and others said burning coal does more than warm the Earth, but causes even more deaths from other types of air pollution that hurt people’s breathing and hearts.
Unlike its earlier report in 2009, which laid out the health problems of climate change, this report was more about what can be done to improve the planet’s health. It calls for cutting air pollution, more walking and cycling and less driving, better urban design, putting a price on the cost of each ton of carbon being used, improved health care planning for extreme weather and every two year check-ups on how the world is doing to get healthier.
“Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” Costello said. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”
Deaths from air pollution are rising around the world. The Lancet report cites research estimating that cutting carbon emissions would cut premature deaths from air pollution by 500,000 a year in 2030, 1.3m in 2050 and 2.2m in 2100, particularly in the heavily polluted cities of India and China. Other work in the US shows the boosts to human health can be worth 10 times the costs of cutting emissions.
The report details the range of damage to health that global warming causes, including heatwaves whose deadly effects are rising around the world, for example in Russia in 2010 where 11,000 people died. Dengue fever is likely to spread, the report finds, and malaria cases may rise in some areas while falling in others. Cholera outbreaks occur when hurricanes mix waste and drinking water and extreme weather is increasing.
“A lot of high-carbon lifestyles are desperately unhealthy,” said Hugh Montgomery, UCL professor of intensive care medicine. “Not having to treat people because they’re not sick is actually the biggest win of all.
“If you look at the intensive care unit I care for, I would say on pretty much any working day, eight out of 10 of the people – at somewhere between £1,500 and £3,000 per day per patient – are there for diseases of lifestyle that are entirely preventable if we make it easier for people to live healthier lifestyles, a lot of which are in fact low-carbon,” Professor Montgomery said.
He insisted that the key to healthier lifestyles was to create a system that channels people into sustainable, active behaviour and blocks them from polluting actions – and was also adamant that nagging and bullying will not make any difference. “If you make it easy for people to walk to work, and pleasant, they will. If you make it difficult and unpleasant, they won’t – even if you tell them it’s good for them,” he added.