Global warming poses an increased risk for asthma, lung illnesses, Lyme disease, Zika virus and anxiety, among other things.
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One
morning in July 2011, Samantha Ahdoot’s 9-year-old son, Isaac, grabbed
his clarinet, trekked up the hilly road to the bus stop and set off for
another day at the band camp near his home in the suburbs of Washington,
D.C.
Within
an hour, Ahdoot’s phone rang: Isaac had collapsed and was en route to
the emergency room on a stretcher. Her otherwise healthy son suffered
heat exhaustion and dehydration from the blistering heat of a summer
that regularly broke temperature records. July alone shattered two
daytime high temperature records in just the D.C. area. Concerned,
Ahdoot, a pediatrician, volunteered to be camp physician. As
temperatures soared, she was forced to cut soccer games short and limit
campers to swimming and indoor activities.
“That
was the experience that first got me thinking about how our summers are
getting hotter and what does that mean for children, their health and
their safety,” Ahdoot, a doctor at Pediatric Associates of Alexandria,
told The Huffington Post by phone on Tuesday. “Climate change isn’t
about our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, just as it’s not about
polar bears and penguins. Climate change is about people and their
health today in 2017.”
On
Wednesday, Ahdoot joined more than 434,000 physicians ― more than half
the doctors in the U.S. ― in a newly formed medical consortium warning
the public about the effects climate change is already having on health.
The Consortium on Climate & Health includes a dozen top medical associations
covering fields ranging from allergies and asthma to internal medicine
to psychiatry. In one of its first moves, the nonprofit coalition plans
to lobby governors, mayors, manufacturers, Fortune 500 chief executives,
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Trump administration to invest in
renewable energy and slash greenhouse gas emissions.
The
group faces an uphill battle. President Donald Trump has made axing
environmental regulations a top priority as the White House seeks to
boost the economy. Already, his administration has lifted regulations to
protect streams and waterways from toxic pollution, scrapped a rule requiring oil and gas drillers to report methane leaks and proposed gutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled a climate change summit just days before Trump was sworn in. Last week, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt ignited a firestorm when he said on CNBC that he doesn’t believe carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming.
Yale University
Even
in red states, the vast majority of Americans disagree with the White
House. Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is
happening, and 53 percent understand that humans are to blame, according
to 2016 survey data
from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Yet despite 71
percent of those surveyed saying they trust scientists’ conclusions on
global warming, less than half realized that most scientists believe
climate change is real.
That’s a problem. For years, oil companies, particularly Exxon Mobil Corporation, have funded
groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on the causes
of climate change as part of disinformation campaigns modeled on efforts
by tobacco companies and automakers to hide the health effects of
smoking and leaded gasoline. In fact, study after study
shows 97 percent or more of climate scientists who actively publish in
peer-reviewed journals agree that increased greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere are warming the planet. The surge in greenhouse gases such as
carbon dioxide and methane irrefutably mirrors the dramatic upswing in industrial emissions, both of which track rising temperatures.
“At
this point, physicians are really trying to speak out about their own
observations and let everyone know it isn’t just climate scientists,”
Mona Sarfaty, director of the new consortium and a professor at George
Mason University, told HuffPost by phone. “Physicians ― who have a
closer relationship with the public than scientists, generally ― are
seeing this, and they feel concerned and feel a responsibility to speak
directly to the American public.”
“To get 12 different major medical organizations coming together like this is rare,” she added. “It doesn’t happen often. It only happens when the stakes are really high.”
Consortium on Climate Health
Just 1 in 4 Americans can name even one way in which climate change poses a risk to health, according to a 2014 poll. A report
released Wednesday in conjunction with the consortium’s launch
announcement outlines three types of maladies linked to global warming:
-
Direct harms, such as injuries and deaths due to increasingly violent
weather, and asthma and other lung diseases exacerbated by extremely
hot weather, wildfires or longer allergy seasons.
-
Diseases spread through insects such as ticks and mosquitoes that
carry infections like Lyme disease or Zika virus, and through
contaminated water and food.
-
Mental health effects, such as increases in depression and anxiety resulting from the damage climate change can do to society.
Stories of such ailments
abound. One anecdote featured in the report detailed the spike in lung
disease, asthma and pneumonia diagnoses after the 2008 Evans Road
wildfire ripped through North Carolina during the state’s worst drought
on record. Another described the medical chaos that followed the
evacuation of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last year as people fled their
homes without medications after two days of torrential rains caused a
“1,000-year” flood.
Last
year, Ahdoot treated a 6-year-old boy for Lyme disease he caught while
riding his bike in Chicago in November, when the city is typically too
cold for ticks to survive.
It’s
difficult to draw a direct line from manmade global warming to
individual diagnoses or weather events. But refusing to cut greenhouse
gases until evidence is as conclusive as the sky is blue is like waiting
until a patient is on a ventilator to begin treatment, Ahdoot said.
“If
doctors waited for absolute certainty, they’d never treat a single
patient because there’s nothing that we do that’s based on certainty,”
Ahdoot said. “There’s only best available evidence. That’s what doctors
use to care for patients.”
“The
best available information today, as determined by over 97 percent of
climatologists and every legitimate scientific organization in the
world,” she added, “is that rising greenhouse gases are warming our
planet.”
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doctors-climate-change_us_58c85231e4b01c029d7717ed
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