Weather and climate have affected human health for millennia. Now, climate change is altering weather and climate patterns that previously have been relatively stable. Climate experts are particularly confident that climate change will bring increasingly frequent and severe heat waves and extreme weather events, as well as a rise in sea levels. These changes have the potential to affect human health in several direct and indirect ways, some of them severe.
Increased Temperatures
Heat exposure has a range of health effects, from mild heat rashes to deadly heat stroke. Heat exposure can also aggravate several chronic diseases, including cardiovascular and respiratory disease. The results can be severe and result in both increased illness and death. Heat also increases ground-level ozone concentrations, causing direct lung injury and increasing the severity of respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Higher temperatures and heat waves increased demand for electricity and thus combustion of fossil fuels, generating airborne particulates and indirectly leading to increased respiratory disease.
Over a longer time period, increased temperatures have other effects ranging from drought to ecosystem changes that can affect health. Drought may also strain agricultural productivity and could result in increased food prices and food shortages, worsening strain on those affected by hunger and food insecurity in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Droughts can result in shortages of clean water and may concentrate contaminants that negatively affect the chemistry of surface waters in some areas.
Ecosystem changes include migration of the vectors (organisms that do not cause disease but transmit infection by carrying pathogens from one host to another) and animal hosts that cause certain diseases prevalent in the U.S., such as Lyme disease and Hantavirus. The dynamics of disease migration are complex and temperature is just one factor affecting the distribution of these diseases.
Winters will also be warmer, which is likely to lead to a decrease in illness and death associated with exposure to cold. This may be one of the few positive health effects of global warming. In addition to this general warming trend, climate change will bring increased weather variability, the results of which are difficult to predict.
The Climate Change & Health – Part 1 by Climate Change HEALTH, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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