[Iskandar] Hello, I'm Dr. John Iskandar,
and welcome to CDC Beyond the Data.
I'm here today with Dr. George Luber,
CDC's Chief of Climate Health.
George, at today's Grand Rounds session we heard about effects
of climate and health.
For example, we heard that, you know,
many physicians are all already reporting
that their patients are seeing some of these effects.
Very broadly what kinds of effects are we talking about?
[Luber] Sure John.
The impacts of climate change on health are varied.
They range from the direct effects
of extreme weather events, from heat waves and storms
and floods directly on people's health, but, also indirectly
through the changes that they incur on ecosystems,
which then again manifest on disease prevalence.
So where in areas that you wouldn't have had a particular
disease if climate change alters the temperature or the rainfall,
you might get more of that disease in a particular area.
Many of the health effects are health effects and diseases
that we already encounter.
But the amount of that disease
and where we find them is going to change profoundly.
[Iskandar] Okay, so just to give some examples
of what you were just saying,
we saw data about Ozone increasing asthma attacks.
But we're also seeing spread of certain types of agents
that spread infectious diseases.
Can you talk a little bit about some of those?
[Luber] Absolutely, in the United States we have a number
of concerns related to vector borne
or insect borne disease to put it crudely.
And those, the effects of climate change
on that are very subtle.
They range from the survivability
of the insects over warmer winters.
When winters are very cold, insects like beetles and ticks
and mosquitoes die more easily.
When winters are warmer a higher proportion of those survive,
increasing the base amount
that reproduces throughout the following year.
So, we get an increase in the abundance of these insects
that might cause disease, but we also get a change
in their distribution, where they're found.
As the frost line moves further north,
as while winters are warming in more northern climates,
those insects are able to move into those areas.
So we're seeing the ticks that spread Lyme disease occurring
in northern, and in areas far north
of where they had occurred previously.
Our work with our grantees has shown that areas of Vermont
and New Hampshire that never had some of these ticks
that transmits Lyme, now do have it.
So we've seen changes in where they're found and how much
of those insects we find in a particular location.
[Iskandar] So then we're seeing increases
in the burden of chronic diseases.
We're seeing increasing incidents
or wider geographic spread of some infectious diseases.
One of the interesting aspects of this session was,
even recognizing that mental health concerns can be related
to climate change.
[Luber] Absolutely, there's a number of dimensions
in which mental health and sense of wellbeing are affected.
If you live in a world of a degraded environment,
perhaps you are less optimistic about the future.
We call this the anticipatory mental health impact.
Living in a world where the future prospects are quite dim.
By some regards as reading extreme climate projections
hasn't as shown to have an impact on younger kids, but,
more directly the consequence
of major natural disasters has been shown there's a high burden
of disease on mental health issues.
Loss of community, loss of livelihood, loss of place
and also loss of family
and other resources have a tremendous long-lasting impact
on those individuals that are affected.
So you see the direct mental health impacts
of extreme weather events and also the more subtle effects
of the living in a world of climate change brings.
[Iskandar] So one of the reasons we chose
to do this session was not simply to go through this list
of different types of adverse impacts of climate change
on health, but to recognize that there is something that we
as a public health community can do about it.
So what are we doing about it?
[Luber] Absolutely, CDC and the Climate Health Program
at CDC is providing leadership on developing adaptation plans
for the public health sector.
Our job in the climate health program is
to prepare the nation's public health infrastructure
to understand the impacts that climate change will bring
in all the various areas of the United States.
The experience that Florida will have
and the challenges they will have will be substantially
different than our colleagues in Maine or Oregon
or Alaska for the matter.
So they need to be able to understand
and interpret the climate science data.
Build into that an assessment
of what are the vulnerabilities to those exposures.
Revealing with a range of exposures
that are quite diverse,
but in magnifying those exposures they will have
dramatic impacts on those vulnerable communities.
So accessing that vulnerability is quite key.
We then match it to a disease burden projection using
statistical methods to get a sense
of what our future epidemiologic profile might look like.
For example, our colleagues
in the Northwest don't experience heat waves currently,
but by looking at the climate models, they can see
that their exposure to heat waves will increase dramatically
in the future, actually in the near future.
So they're putting systems in place right now
to develop the capacity to prevent negative health outcomes
of heat waves before they happen.
We're looking into the future
to understand what our future epidemiologic experience
will be.
[Iskandar] So right now, for example, coastal communities,
are going to be potentially more concerned about flooding
and maybe inland areas more concerned about wildfires,
but there's that need to, as you said,
look, look forward as well.
So I think one of the other important aspects
of this session is that we're trying to make available a lot
of the underlying science about climate change and health.
Is there a particular key resource that people can seek
out for that information?
[Luber] Absolutely, you know much of the material
that we presented today was based upon the national climate
assessment, actually the third US national climate assessment,
which is a report that is mandated by court
that is mandated by law.
And it synthesizes the available evidence, the strength
of the evidence as well in the association to climate change
and various impacts, and we assess it for health.
We provide not only a synthesis of the available evidence,
but in the back of the document we call traceable account,
which is our estimation of the quality and strength
of the evidence supporting our claims.
It provides a great resource for those interested in this topic.
But the effects of climate change don't end at our borders.
Certainly there's global issues and another document
that was also released this year,
which is the intergovernmental panel on climate change,
also known as IPCC, has another very similar process
for synthesizing the evidence and reporting routinely.
In their fifth assessment report was released this spring.
CDC and our colleagues were authors on it as well,
and that provides a global perspective on health
and climate change, how the health outcomes will vary
between developed and developing countries for example.
[Iskandar] So excellent resources,
thank you very much George.
Please join us next month
for another episode of Beyond the Data.