A plan by President Barack Obama to better protect public health from the impacts of climate change has been signed by the Yale School of Public Health and a host of other top public health, medical and nursing schools across the country.
Unveiled Tuesday as part of National Public Health Week, the plan outlines a series of measures to minimize the potentially severe public health consequences associated with changing weather patterns.
By signing the document, Dean Paul Cleary and the leaders of other top schools commit to train the next generation of health professionals to address what are expected to be far-reaching consequences on physical and mental health in communities around the world.
“I have no doubt that the direct and indirect effects of climate change on health will become increasingly important over the coming decade,” Cleary said. “It is important that we continue to think about how best to educate the public health leaders of tomorrow so that they will be able to address these incredibly important issues.”
Toward this, the Yale School of Public Health is currently developing a course, “Climate Change, Energy and Health,” that will be geared toward both public health students and undergraduates, particularly undergraduates who are Global Health Fellows and Energy Studies Undergraduate Scholars. The course will be offered for the first time in the fall of 2016.
“The field of climate change and health is still in its infancy. Developing and teaching this course will serve as a vehicle for me to become immersed in this complex problem and I hope will make an important contribution by educating future public health leaders,” said Professor Robert Dubrow, who is developing the course.
Already observed or projected health effects of climate change include relatively direct effects, such as increased morbidity and mortality from heat waves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; increased incidence of food-borne, water-borne and vector-borne diseases; increased under-nutrition and food insecurity; and increased incidence of asthma, Dubrow said. However, substantial indirect health effects can also be projected resulting from factors such as societal unrest due to economic scarcity; mass displacements due to rising sea levels and consequent mass migrations; and armed conflicts resulting from such migrations as well as from competition among nations for scarcer resources.
In addition, to these issues, the Yale School of Public Health course will also address health effects related to fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and burning, as well as health effects of other energy sources, including solar and wind. Students will study health effects of conventional fossil fuel mining as well as more recent extreme extraction methods, including mountaintop removal of coal, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, and tar sands mining of oil. The course will also study “co-benefits” of interventions to reduce CO2 emissions, such as reduction in harmful air pollutants, a shift toward a healthier plant-based diet, and increased physical activity resulting from increased use of walking, bicycling and public transportation, he said.
In an interview Tuesday with CNN, the President Obama said that the time for concerted action to protect health has come. “There are a whole host of public health impacts that are going to hit home, so we’ve got to do better in protecting vulnerable Americans,” he said. “Ultimately, though, all of our families are going to be vulnerable. You can't cordon yourself off from air or climate.”
Beyond bringing together leading public health professionals, the president’s plan includes expanding access to climate and health data, steps to improve air quality data, convening scientific and community forums, further integrating climate change considerations into government policies and enlisting companies such as Microsoft and Google to use their expertise to address public health challenges associated with changing weather trends.
In 2009, The Lancet and the University College London Global Health Commission concluded that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.
The World Health Organization, meanwhile, estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250 000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050. Most of these deaths will likely be associated with malaria, diarrhea, heat exposure and under-nutrition.
YSPH Professor Durland Fish, director of the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies Center for EcoEpidemiology, continues to study the effects of climate change on infectious diseases, including ones spread by ticks (such as Lyme disease) as well as the migration of disease-carrying mosquitoes beyond their traditional ranges.
Recently, chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease, appeared in the Americas for the first time. The disease used to be confined to Africa and other parts of the world. Since arriving in the Caribbean, chikungunya has spread rapidly to other islands and into North and South America. Fish worked on the island of Dominica late last year with local health officials in an attempt to slow the spread of the potentially debilitating disease.
“There were 30 cases when I arrived and 60 more next week. By then, 20 new cases were coming in each day and it was impossible to maintain a containment operation. The battle was soon lost and it was a sobering experience for me,” Fish said. “Now, we are working with public health officials in Dominica to try to understand what happened as this will be repeated over and over as the epidemic moves through the Caribbean and onto the mainland.”