More dry weather. Sea Levels rising. Insects thriving.
Another Hollywood take on the apocalypse?
Nope. Another forecast about climate change, but this time it’s about the potential impact on public health.
So far, only five states have developed a strategy to deal with it, and neither Missouri nor Kansas is among them.
“All these problems are coming, but as country we haven’t done enough to prepare for them,” said Jeff Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy group, which authored the report.
Levi and other experts spoke about the report during a conference call Monday with reporters.
Only California, Virginia, Maryland, Washington and New Hampshire have a climate change – also referred to as global warming - strategic plan that includes a public health response, according to the report, Health Problems Heat Up: Climate Change and the Public’s Health.
Twelve states, including Kansas, have climate change commissions whose memberships include someone from the state’s public health agency.
Twenty-two states, including Kansas and Missouri, along with New York City, have received federal money to study health problems and the environment.
Thirty-three states, including Missouri, have gotten federal funds for state asthma control programs, and Washington has furnished 49 states – not Alaska - the resources to track insect-spread diseases.
Kansas has also created a Bureau of Environmental Health. Among its goals is to study the affects of climate change, according to Maggie Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
In Missouri, Kit Wagar, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Senior Services, said the agency tracks and studies illnesses with environmental causes.
Climate change refers to the buildup in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which trap heat much like the way a greenhouse acts to grow plants. Over time it has caused the planet and the oceans to heat up, according to scientists.
“Over the years we’ve heard a lot about the impact global warming is having or will have on our natural habitat,” said Phyllis Cuttino, director of the U.S. Global Warming Campaign for the Pew Environmental Group. “We’ve heard a lot less how these changes are likely to impact our health.”
They are likely to affect temperature and air quality. Predictions call for more severe and extreme weather, such as floods, droughts and hurricanes.
The report said that certain communities, such as high-density, low-income urban neighborhoods and low-lying coastal areas, could be more at-risk for public health problems.
Certain groups of people could be as well: infants and children, pregnant women, the elderly, the poor, minorities and people with chromic medical conditions.
The report recommended that a “national action plan” be developed to improve the ability of the states to respond.
Late to the Show, Again
Typically, due to its highly charged and verbally abusive politics and disregard for science, the US and most US states are late to the show on understanding and anticipating public and personal health risks arising from climate change. This can produce a fiasco very much worse than our preparation for swine flu and other infectious diseases. Readers interested in work in this area will have to find references and studies from Europe, Australia, and New Zealand many of which have questionable application to the US. Even when available in the US, these studies are first published by companies with a disproptional presence in Europe (Oxford University Press, Springer, etc.)or in professional journals that almost never reach the public in the US. It appears that the right-wing has done is scare work too well and placed the American public at considerable potential risk.