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STORY: From heat stress, to air pollution, and the increased spread of disease...A warming climate is making people sick around the planet, threatening to undo decades of progress in public health."The climate crisis is a health crisis. It's well overdue that 27 COPs have been and gone without a serious discussion of health."This year's UN climate summit, COP28, was the first time leaders there focused on public health.Here are some key ways that experts say climate change is making people sick.Mosquitoes that carry viruses including dengue, malaria and Zika are shifting into new parts of the world,as warmer temperatures and heavy rains create more hospitable conditions for them to breed.Take Bangladesh, which is grappling with its worst-ever outbreak of dengue.Experts say it has been driven by rising temperatures and a longer monsoon season.While floods in Pakistan last year, led to a 400% increase in malaria cases in the country.The disease has also spread into the highlands of Africa that previously had been too cold for mosquitoes.Water-borne diseases are also on the rise.Cholera is spread by contaminated food and water and can kill within hours without treatment.In 2022, 44 countries reported cases of the disease, a 25% increase over 2021.That's according to the World Health Organisation, which noted the role played by cyclones, floods, and drought in cutting off access to clean water and helping bacteria to thrive.Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the Director General of the WHO."Changing weather patterns driven by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels is contributing to record numbers of cholera outbreaks. And our warming planet is expanding the range of mosquitoes which carry dangerous pathogens like Dengue, Chikungunya, Zika and Yellow Fever into places that have never dealt with them before."Heat stress is one of the more obvious health impacts of global warming and is projected to impact hundreds of millions of people, as temperatures continue to climb over the next few decades.A July study in the journal Nature Medicine estimated that some 61,000 people died during European heatwaves in the summer of 2022.The heat has also made forests drier, fueling extreme wildfires across the world.In the United States, wildfire air pollution now kills somewhere between 4,000 and 28,000 people every year.Doctor Lujain Alqodmani is the president of the World Medical Association."I'm a physician. I saw firsthand the health impacts of climate change. We saw a surge of emergency admissions of heat stress, heat exhaustion, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health diseases. We even saw vector borne diseases in Europe and not just in the usual regions. So our health system is already exhausted. They're not resilient enough."As the COP28 summit focused on health, the United Arab Emirates and several charities offered $777 million to help eradicate neglected tropical diseases that are expected to worsen as temperatures climb.
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