health issue today. In one recent survey of 1,200 allergists, 48 percent said climate change is already affecting their patients a “great deal” or a “moderate amount.” In another survey of lung specialists, 77 per- cent said they were seeing patient symp- toms grow more severe due to worsening climate-related air quality. In a sweeping review published last
October in Te Lancet medical journal, a team of healthcare professionals proclaimed that the human symptoms of climate change are “unequivocal and potentially ir- reversible,” noting that since 2000, the num- ber of people in the United States exposed to heat waves annually has risen by about 14.5 million, and the number of natural disasters annually has increased 46 percent. Te U.S. Centers for Disease Control
Healthy Climate,
Healthy People Why a Warming Planet is Harming Our Health
by Lisa Marshall S
amantha Ahdoot’s son Isaac was 9 years old when he collapsed from the heat while playing clarinet at band
camp. It had been a record-hot summer following a mild winter and early spring, and Dr. Ahdoot, an Alexandria, Virginia, pediatrician, had already noticed a string of unusual cases: A toddler had contracted Lyme disease in the once tick-free region of Northern Maine. A teenager had suffered an asthma attack in February, a full month before she usually started taking allergy medicine. A displaced grade-schooler from out of town arrived traumatized aſter fleeing a hurricane-ravaged home with her family. But it wasn’t until she saw her son laying on a gurney in the emergency room with an IV in his arm that she fully con- nected the dots.
16 Austin Edition “I was aware that the weather had
changed a lot since I was kid. But it really didn’t hit home until that day that climate change could affect my health and the health of my children person- ally,” recalls Ahdoot. “I realized it would be a betrayal of my duty as a pediatrician to sit back and do nothing about it.”
Health Care Alert Ahdoot, now a vocal climate change activist, is among a growing number of healthcare professionals that have begun to reframe climate change not as a concern for elsewhere or the future, but as a pressing U.S. public
AustinAwakenings.com
and Prevention has also begun to weigh in with a Climate-Ready States and Cities Initiative to help local health departments brace for everything from the hazardous air quality associated with more forest fires to the spread of vector-borne diseases like Zika and West Nile as the range and season of mosquitoes and ticks expands. Meanwhile, groups like the newly
formed and expansive Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, to which Ahdoot belongs, are being proactive. Its doctors are greening their offices, swapping cars for bikes, buses or carpooling, lobbying lawmakers and encouraging their patients to undertake measures to prevent the problem from worsening. In the process, they say, they might even improve their own health. “We want the public to understand
that climate change is not just about polar bears or receding glaciers in the Arctic, but also about our children and our health here and now,” says Ahdoot.
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