Health and Climate

Building a climate-resilient polio-free world is a technical brief issued last month by the World Health Organization on behalf of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Having been involved with polio eradication for forty-odd years, I wondered what a public health perspective might add to the daily headlines of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms.

Case in point: Pakistan. In 2022, warming air and ocean set off a sequence of drought, record-breaking monsoon rains, and meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. Catastrophic floods from May to October displaced nearly eight million people. At the peak, almost a third of the country was under water. Roads, bridges, and entire villages were destroyed. In the health sector:

• Masses of people wading through wastewater spread cholera and polio.
• Nearly 1,500 health facilities were devastated and nonfunctional.
• Displaced health workers couldn’t get vaccines or medicines to their patients.
• Destruction of crops and livestock created a severe food shortage.

Globally, rising temperatures are expected to cause a quarter million deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue, and heat stress. Longer, hotter summers mean more disease-bearing mosquitoes, which kill more humans than does any other animal. I tend to think of health and climate as two important but mostly unrelated issues. Not so.

Image: Cattail Mosquito (Coquillettidia perturbans), widespread carrier of West Nile virus and other diseases. Photo by David McCorquodale.