Climate change and health

Paul Barclay.

Climate change poses a serious risk to public health: more bushfires, heat-related deaths and hospitalisations, diminished safe drinking water, reduced crop production, and a growth in vector, and water-borne diseases. 

Following Australia's hottest summer on record, Paul Barclay speaks to a panel of experts about the relationship between climate change and public health, and how best to deal with threats posed by a hotter planet. 

Listen to the Radio National program recorded on May 1 this year at an Australian National University symposium - “Climate change and health.”

Climate change worsens Zika virus: WHO

Tamires da Costa, 16, who is four months
 pregnant, stands in a street with standing
flood water next to her home in the
Parque Sao Bento shantytown of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, earlier this year.

The outbreak of Zika virus in Central and South America is of immediate concern to pregnant women in the region, but for some experts the situation is a glimpse of the sort of public health threats that will unfold due to climate change.

“Zika is the kind of thing we’ve been ranting about for 20 years,” said Daniel Brooks, a biologist at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “We should’ve anticipated it. Whenever the planet has faced a major climate change event, man-made or not, species have moved around and their pathogens have come into contact with species with no resistance.”

It’s still not clear what role rising temperatures and altered rainfall patterns have had on the spread of Zika, which is mainly spread by mosquitos; the increased global movement of people is probably as great an influence as climate change for the spread of infectious diseases. But the World Health Organization, which declared a public health emergency over the birth defects linked to Zika, is clear that changes in climate mean a redrawn landscape for vector and water-borne diseases.

Read The Guardian story - “Climate change may have helped spread Zika virus, according to WHO scientists.”