Human health an important signal of climate change

Mitigating the effects of climate change is a critical priority for governments if they are to reduce its associated health risks, the leading Australian epidemiologist Prof. Tony McMichael will tell Commonwealth Health Ministers meeting in Geneva on Sunday.

Prof. McMichael, from the Australian National University, Canberra, will describe the need to stabilise, or reduce greenhouse gas concentrations, while at the same time develop adaptive strategies as an urgent, ‘first-order task’.

Actions to reduce greenhouse gases and increase carbon bio-sequestration -- the storage of carbon in forests and soils -- will have a positive spin-off on human health, through improved air quality, diet and exercise and should be included in national health risk assessments.

Prof. McMichael, who is Director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, will make his presentation to Ministers and senior officials on 17 May, 2009 on ‘Issues for risk assessment, risk management – and mitigation’.

The theme for this year’s Commonwealth Health Ministers Meeting is ‘Climate Change and Health’. Many of the Commonwealth’s 53 countries will suffer disproportionately from the impact of climate change directly through temperature extremes, extreme weather events and rising sea levels and indirectly through reduced air quality, water and food insecurity, altered patterns of infectious diseases, economic disruption and displacement.

Given the Commonwealth’s geographical make-up of 32 small states, including 25 island nations; 18 African countries; the Canadian Arctic and low-lying nations such as Bangladesh; climate change is critical to health planning and strategy.

According to Prof McMichael, the existence and prospect of risks to human health “provides an important signal as to the profound nature” of human induced climate change. And low income countries are particularly vulnerable.

“Climate change threatens efforts to reduce longstanding public health problems...and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” he will argue, adding that “we should not view climate change as a separate or even competing agenda relative to current health practice.”

Public health capacity needs to be extended and strengthened in order to minimise the disruptive and multiplier effects of climate change.

According to the World Health Organisation, 150-200K deaths each year in the world’s poorest countries are due to climate change, through crop failure, malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, malaria and flooding.

The meeting’s keynote speaker is Professor Sir Andrew Haines, Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Prof. Haines is an expert in epidemiology and the study of environmental influences on health, including the potential effects of global environmental change.

During the one-day meeting, Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, will hold a dialogue with ministers.

Dr Caroline Pontefract, Director of Social Transformations Programmes Division at the Commonwealth Secretariat said: “This important topic is of particular relevance to many vulnerable Commonwealth countries, which lack the capacity to mitigate, but are already experiencing the impacts of climate change on public health. The meeting will be an opportunity for health ministers to discuss their concerns and collaborate on ways to tackle this global problem.”

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