Climate change and human health

Jun 1, 2010 by admin

Global climate change is said to have the greatest impact on human health. The change is so conspicuous that world leaders agreed on holding a meeting in 2009 to find ways of tackling this change. Unfortunately, they could not agree on the pertinent issues.

It is said that current mean diurnal temperatures are 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than they were 30 years ago.  Disproportionate warming of tropical regions has increased the rate of flooding. W.H.O claims that worldwide over 200 million people are affected by flooding annually; many of the effects having to do with human health. Flooding contaminates drinking water increasing the risk of communicable diseases. Molds and fungi tend to grow in the aftermath of floods whose spores are asthmatic to particular people.      

The impact of droughts on human health is also worth noting. Droughts chiefly lower food production leading to nutritional diseases like marasmus and kwashiorkor. Changes in vector breeding sites have also resulted in malaria and sleeping sickness. Respiratory ailments from heat waves and cardiovascular mortality are the other sad consequences of climate change.

Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases are diseases that are spread from one person to the other either directly or through a vector. Climate change resulting into floods often displaces people causing them to become crowded in a single locality. This raises the chance of spread of infectious diseases. Some other infectious diseases depend on availability (or lack) of food. The El Nino rain of 1992 led to an explosion in the mouse population leading to the outbreak of Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in various parts of the world.

Climate change also alters the distribution of vectors either by increasing or decreasing their populations. Many of these vectors cannot regulate their internal temperatures hence easily affected by temperature change. Rate of maturation and reproduction are some of the processes that are affected by climate change especially change in temperature.

Some key infectious diseases caused by climate change include: Malaria-transmitted by the female anopheles mosquito. Variation in malaria transmission is caused by changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity. Low temperature is known to increase the survival of the mosquito larvae hence high reproduction. Dengue virus and yellow fever are other mosquito based sicknesses.  Dengue is an issue in urban areas and known to get to its peak in the event of high rainfall and increased humidity. Leishmaniasis transmitted by sand flies is also climate influenced. The flies are sensitive to temperature and type of soil.