A growing number of doctors and front-line healthcare workers are turning to climate activism to urge global leaders to declare climate change a public health emergency.
Doctors and health workers, some clad in white coats and brandishing placards, marched to the headquarters of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva on Saturday to demand that health authorities and governments prioritise climate change to avert a global health crisis. If you’re dealing with pain in your body because of an injury, have a peek at this web-site.
Their demands for immediate action included a focus on preventative healthcare with education programmes in schools and the wider community, more equitable distribution and access to medical care, reducing the carbon impact of health care, and stricter control of industries to ensure clean water and air.
Underscoring the progressive nature of their platform, the protesters also called for the creation of citizen assemblies to steer strategic health decisions. Their demands were listed in a petition, signed by more than 1,200 prominent doctors and healthcare workers from around the world.
WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who welcomed the protesters, said that while “the pandemic will end, there is no vaccine for climate change”. He later tweeted that health and climate change were “inextricably intertwined” and that the WHO would be “standing in solidarity and urging global action” with the demonstrators.
Indeed, the WHO and the prestigious Lancet medical journal have declared climate change the biggest threat to global health in the 21st century – a declaration made even before the Covid-19 crisis.
Front-line health workers and researchers may have been sounding the alarm on climate change for years, but it is only recently that more voices have stepped up to lead rallies, sign petitions and publish studies with the same fierce urgency as grassroots activists.
Professor Valerie D’Acremont, an infectious diseases physician and global health specialist at Lausanne University Hospital, is among those speaking out.
D’Acremont, who mainly divides her work between Africa and Europe, said that frustration has driven her towards more health advocacy work because “governments and the public have failed to understand the strong links between climate change and biodiversity loss and health”.
“We want governments to take action,” she said. “Many of us feel it makes no more sense to do our job because we are fed up with being always behind, preparing for the next health catastrophe instead of acting on the root causes of the problems. Covid-19 is one illustration of this problem.”
A rise in cases of dehydration and heat stroke, and floods that spread cholera, are real consequences if countries continue on their current trajectories. Then there are the diseases not seen before in Europe, such as Dengue fever, that have reached France, Spain and Croatia. Cases of Zika have also been found in southern Europe.
Others – such as tick-borne encephalitis and the West Nile virus, which are already present in the United States – are also cause for concern.
Some diseases like cardiovascular, peripheral artery disease, and respiratory illnesses will increase more strongly, but it’s harder for people to make the link to climate change because they already exist, D’Acremont said. Doctors also claimed it is a good time for those who live close to people with chronic respiratory illness to learn CPR since it can really save lives, to start learning you can enroll at this CPR Certification Classes in Toledo.
‘We can’t continue in this direction’
D’Acremont is also a member of Doctors for Extinction Rebellion (Swiss chapter), the group behind Saturday’s rally. It emerged as an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental activism group that gained notoriety in the UK in April 2019 for hugely disruptive demonstrations that brought downtown London to a standstill and drew the ire of thousands of commuters caught up in the chaos. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was prompted to weigh in, dismissing the climate change protesters “crusties” who live in “hemp-smelling bivouacs”.
But the British prime minister’s caricature of climate activists missed the mark: a core group of front-line health workers and doctors branched off to create Doctors for Extinction Rebellion, keeping the name and merging climate activism with public health.
The group has now distanced itself from its more radical origins and is among several groups attracting activists from the medical field. While some might consider the practice of medicine and social activism to be incompatible, D’Acremont said there was already a movement among health professions to speak out over cracks in the health system, though she agrees climate activism among doctors is a relatively new phenomenon.
“Some public health experts were already saying we can’t continue in this direction. The human side of medicine is getting lost because the health system is not allowing us to do preventative medicine. The system has to adapt and climate change is making this point.”
‘Medicine is inherently political’
Dr. Rita Issa, a London-based general practitioner, academic and co-founder of Doctors for Extinction Rebellion in the UK, says that she felt a “moral duty” as a doctor to speak up about climate change. She said she is already seeing an alarming number of patients, including children, in her clinic who suffer from a variety of health problems linked to climate change.
“Patients come with a host of factors that impact their health, like the food they eat, the houses they live in and the air they breathe,” Dr. Issa said. “I’m seeing children with 10 percent reduced lung capacity. If we’re truly to address their health we also have to tackle the air they breathe. If we don’t want to have to treat kids with worsening lung capacity and heatstroke, then we need to take action now.”
Dr. Issa’s findings in her clinical practice are backed up by scientific data.
Results from a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change showed that more than a third of heat-related deaths around the world from 1991 to 2018 were the result of human-induced global warming. More than 43 countries in the study recorded heat levels higher than the optimal temperature for human health.
Researchers also found that the health impacts of climate change were already being felt. Despite Covid-19 lockdowns, which saw a global fall in pollution levels last year, global temperatures still rose to 1.2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, edging close to the 1.5°C maximum benchmark set by the world’s nations.
It’s not just Europe.
The shock of the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated that there is a public health issue that “doesn’t respect national boundaries, or care if you’re rich or poor”, said Dr. Issa, adding that she believed the crisis helped the health aspect of climate change break into the mainstream.
While she understands that activism is not for all doctors, Dr. Issa believes that “medicine is inherently political”.
“We have a responsibility to pick up signs of things early, as part of our work as doctors, and it extends beyond individual patients. Part of the reason we founded Doctors for Extinction Rebellion was to direct insight on how issues impact our patients and community, and to communicate scientific information into something digestible.”
Although active in signing petitions urging climate change action, Professor Antoine Flahault dismisses any suggestion that he is an activist.
Speaking from the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, where he is the director, Flahault said he has been warning about the health impacts of climate change as part of his everyday clinical observations as a doctor and researcher.
During the pandemic, data substantiated direct links between global air pollution levels and outbreaks of Covid-19, with spikes observed where outbreaks were active, especially in cities in India as well as Paris and London. And though the link between reducing air pollution and improving the climate situation is an obvious one, he sees changes to how healthcare is delivered as a less-talked-about but crucial aspect of managing climate change.
Like D’Acremont,he wants to see reforms to help meet the challenges by rethinking the traditionally top-down approach of the health system.
“We need to include the citizen and patients in their own care,” he said. “We also have to try to educate the public that more is less and of the benefits of parsimony by abstaining from too many exploratory tests and treatments. It’s not just the cost to the social security system and to patients, it’s also the carbon footprint of all these procedures and how we administer health care.”
If he can convey just one message to global leaders ahead of the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow in November, Flahault hopes to make clear that “there can be no healthy lives without a healthy planet”.
It’s a warning likely to resonate more acutely this week, at least in France – where the mercury is expected to rise as a heatwave sweeps across the country, a trend seen in recent years that has often been marked by heat-related illnesses and fatalities.
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Since liberals are so worried about carbon dioxide in the Atmosphere, they should quit talking, because they are causing global warming.
It’s very discouraging to find, with some frequency, people with training in science who are willing to subscribe to rather unscientific statements, proposals, and predictions. Both history and theory preclude control of climate change by CO2 at this time, at these levels.
How’s about they all STOP BREATHING!!
Better yet, they need to quite breathing and do us all a favor.. That should cut carbon emissions in half
“A rise in cases of dehydration and heat stroke, and floods that spread cholera, are real consequences if countries continue on their current trajectories.”
We i got off the plane at Bahrain, the heat hit me like a wall. I asked the guys that were their to pick me up; how can you stand this heat and they said “you will get use to it in about a week and I did. Some days it got up to 120 degrees F. but wasn’t that bad after you got use to it. If the heat is so bad why do people live at the equator around the earth?
Same with folks who live in CA, or TExas or Louisanna, where it gets hot as hell..
“Front-line health workers (?) and researchers (gov sponsored)…sounding the alarms on climate change for years,”! Yes, with dire predictions that were no where near any target they set for themselves either in results or time line, how many deadlines have come and gone. Still over thousands of years of climate swings more drastic than the latest predictions life including human has managed to survive from the steamy rain forests to the arid deserts to the frozen lands abutting the North Pole. Humans are more adaptable than these scare mongers think we are, they’re just too accustomed to their creature comforts to adapt themselves!
Conveniently omitted is that Global Warming got rid of the Ice Age. And we know the sun and volcanoes do not contribute to global warming as well as Chinese coal plants. How much BS can we in America absorb.
No plastic bags, no paper bags, no styrofoam, no fossil fuel, no nuclear energy, no fracking, no A/C, no electrical power plants, no cows, pigs or farming, no SUV’s, no lumber mills, no mining and for those who weren’t aborted – they seek abortion as the answer for other than themselves. We all know the Mojave and Sahara deserts were formed because of the Industrial Revolution by people kind. (trying to be politically correct on that one)
AND can any of them name ONE PREDICTION OF Direness, that has ACTUALLY COME TRUE??
Its a conspiracy—they’re trying to drive us all crazy. COVID lockdowns and restrictions, racism, and now climate change—all contributors to health issues. How did we ever make it this far and how will we ever survive as our future looks increasingly dire?
I still say our biggest threat is the stupidity virus that is running rampant—and I am more and more convinced that there actually is one. Too bad it doesn’t kill on contact.
The biggest danger is in our white house and our government.. the nightmare in the white house and his cult of radical democRATS who are destroying this country… now they are blaming everything on climate change and racism… They are tearing apart this country and they are racially dividing us all … this nightmare of an administration is destroying the country and the American people.. GOD HELP US ALL AS OUR COUNTRY GOES DOWN!!! We need to get the enemy out of our white house, Congress and the senate… People best wake up or we won’t have a country
The country was already destroyed long before that
puppet freak stepped foot in the WH but people
have been too dumbed-down to know it. FIRST, the
RULING-ELITE seeking global government took
control of our govt, then in 1917 the govt conspired
with them for the takeover of the American Press
for the sole purpose of using it moving forward, to
bestow propaganda & deception on our minds &
mold us to conform to the false teaching.
Congressional records show that they intended to
report what they needed the people to believe was
the truth–what we now call fake news!
They later added EDUCATION to this “Management
System” with the ultimate goal of indoctrinating
us into accepting the idea of GLOBAL GOVT. The
top ELITE families that includes the CARNEGIE’S
and JP MORGAN, used the writings by visionaries
on how to achieve global governing as their guide,
& have nearly succeeded in completing their goal.
BIDEN was/is merely a puppet needed to replace
Trump, who’ll help sign America’s death certificate
as he’s guided to do when they pull his strings!
AND every damn one of these ‘doctors’ seem to have been infected with that stupidity virus.
Only low IQ individuals will buy into the “Alarm” propaganda.
The Democrats are going broke trying to buy all of it.
SINCE they’re not using their OWN money, they are not the ones going broke.. WE THE TAX VICTIMS are.
AKA Democrat voters.
the biggest threat to the health of the nation is BIG GOVERNMENT!
AMEN Capricorn1.. our biggest enemy resides in the white house.. him and his cult of radical democRATS… They are tearing apart this country more and more every day… They are also racially dividing the country… These radicals are consumed with hate for the American people and America… GOD HELP US ALL
The biggest threat to mental health, economic health, peace, love and prosperity is the reckless, wastfiul, worthless Demo rat party and it merry band of professional thieves.
ALONG with their willing mouth pieces in the lame stream media, and big tech.
Every one of these BULLSCHIFF spewing, lying, so-called doctors should have their licenses revoked, and they should be thrown in jail for mal-practice!!!!! Stupid doesn’t begin to describe what comes out of their mouths.
I say if they really want hospitals to go all carbon free, FINE. YOU START by ceasing on having every damn office and hallway lit, 24/7.. STOP everyone driving in their cars INDIVIDUALLY and force them all to carpool or ride public transportation. AND STOP Having the doctors have 2-3 homes each.
Just More Bull carp as usual ! The “Scientists ” get caught ” fudging” the stats and they STILL expect you to believe their lies.
I am personally concerned with the ‘health risks’ presented by doctors and healthcare workers; it’s why I try to avoid both…
Oh my God, the sky is falling.
There are days, part of me really would LOVE TO SEE the sky actually FALL ON THESE naysayers heads.. AND SQUISH THEM INTO pulp.
Following the total failure by health care regarding the Wuhan virus now they are turning to another false God to worship and drive down our throats. They need to stick to helping people stay healthy by talking about obesity, proper diets, food additives, exercise, etc.. By using the scam of climate change they know their performance can not nor will be measured. They should stick to the field they have been educated and trained for. disgusting diversion technique by them. This is a political statement not a health statement.
The “party of science” ignores scientific evidence, from the Greenland Ice Core project (GRIP), that the temperature has been declining for the past 8,000 years. The Roman period was the coldest it had been for 6,000 years. The medieval warm period was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the Roman period. The “Little Ice Age” followed by the 1815 Tambora eruption resulted in 1870 being the coldest time in 8,000 years.
The world started gathering meteorology data in 1870.
Yes, the climate has warmed. But from what? The coldest time in 8,000 years. So we have a really bad experiment guiding public policy. And average temperature has been declining for the last twenty years.
Scientific data, that the climate-change cherry-pickers ignore, is at
https://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/data/ddjtemp.txt
Too bad the white coats are not protesting the skies being sprayed with chemicals to manipulate the weather and block out the sun. So yeah, global climate control is an issue, but they want us to believe that it is because we take hot showers, drive cars and eat meat that is the cause. That along with the chemicals and genetic modification of our food supply are the real health issues of our day.
Hmmm so 1,200 supposed ‘prominent’ (by who’s criteria?) Doctors and Healthcare Workers have demands and signed a petition. That’s out of the 59 MILLION healthcare workers in the world.
So, 0.002% of the world’s HC workers signed a petition, and this article is trying to imply this carries weight?
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
Good question. WHY IS IT the voices of this group, OUTWEIGHS the voices of all the OTHERS in health care..??
Because the state run media gives them a microphone and a voice to spew their lies and their hate. And they ban or censor the rest like they did to TRump.
Climate Change.. another way for the insane cult of radical politicians to steal our tax dollars and cost us more and more money .. FOR WHAT!!! to line someone’s pockets… Look at Kerry, telling people it’s too bad they lost their jobs and wanting everyone to get rid of carbon while he flies around on his private jet!!! The whole thing is a bunch of garbage!!!
Right on time, the covid scam is running out and winding down, so time to move on to the next thing until a new strain of covid can get traction. Wake up people, climate change was proven to be a scam years ago and these fools are still pushing it on the unsuspecting sheep.
Climate change due to what white supremacy too?
I think the biggest immediate health risk is obesity but that’s the third rail. Even the malnutrition illegal aliens crossing the border are fat!
Which i often cry about. IF THEY ARE REALLY SO POOR and needy, HOW ARE THEY SO FAT!
I know it’s nit picking here but I ain’t buyin’ it!
That line “Doctors and health workers, some clad in white coats and brandishing placards…” should probably read:
“Alleged Doctors and health workers, some in costume, marched to the headquarters of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva…..”
Assuming them to be “doctors” with no evidence? Is the title based solely on the apparel as it was so many times in Barry Setoreo’s Rose Garden photo shoots?
And did they actually march? Was that a traditional march or were they goose stepping like they did in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany and they still do in Russia, China and North Korea?
were they even really doctors or are they more fake news? I say its all fake news. What doctor has time for such stupid displays of political activism?
Especially when we keep geting told “THEY ARE being overworked, cause of covid”..
Just checked but the mid-Cretaceous about 100 millions years ago was significantly warmer than today. Unless all the paleontologists missed it, there is no fossil record of dino-SUVs or dino-fossil fuel power plants. Seems that global warming and cooling happens quite naturally.
Don’t confuse the climate change stooges with logic or facts. Now if only we can keep the left wingers from giving our tax dollars to the WHO for this stupid cause.
of course it does. If we didn’t have global warming NY and half of north America would still be buried under ice of the last ice age. The Sahara desert (in North Africa) use to be a lush fertile region during the last ice age. Wind and Weather patterns changed with the melting of the ice causing North Africa to gradually becoming drier as time went by. Now it a desert. I guess the wooly Mammoth and saber tooth tigers were farting so much and adding carbon to the atmosphere.
Hah, me believe nutty climate activists disguised as doctors & scientists instead of my lying eyes? It’s not going to happen.
Populations get sick & die, not from climate change, but from greedy corrupt self serving govts that keep them impoverished & living in medieval squalor without access to education, jobs, transportation, food supply, clean water or basic health care, all of which are dependent on access to affordable reliable energy that is currently only possible worldwide via fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
Any sadistic, phony, self-adulating doctors & scientists who want to live without the available affordable energy needed to sustain all aspects of human life should do so – the rest of us will live longer without their genocidal attacks on the human race.
Sorry, but my doctor or most doctors have no particular qualifications to make their opinion about global warming any more valid than say my plumber or my mail carrier or my accountant. Why should I pay them any attention?
Just like why should WHYNEY brats who’ve never owned, or fired a gun, GET TO DECIDE who can and cannot own firearms!
There is no climate change PERIOD! It’s all a Democrat ploy to control the American citizens. Democrats are trying to confiscate all weapons owned by law abiding citizens so there will be no resistance.
If they manage to disarm the American people the elite know-it-all fascists in the Democrat party will gladly herd us into cattle cars and ship us off to the Death camps. You can bet you life on that prophesy. Their fear of the average person and their hyper lying tyranny know no bounds.
Climate change? Hoaxity, hoaxity, hoax hoax hoax, Hoaxity, hoaxity, hoax hoax hoax, Hoaxity, hoaxity, hoax hoax hoax, hoax – hoax hoax hoax. To the tune of the William Tell Overture.
Everything the Democrats do and say is a lie and a hoax designed to fool us. They want to control us, turn us against each other, steal our money, our freedom and kill us if necessary to get their way. And half the American people haven’ t caught on yet or just don’t care. The policies they propose are straight out of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s political play book. There are no good ideas or good intentions coming out of the Democrat party and their fascist marriage to Corporate America and globalism. DON’T BUY THE LIE that there are any MODERATES in the Democrap party, “THE MEDIA” or among their Corporate friends and sponsors.
Radicalized Islamist terrorists, the Chinese Communist Party… nope, the biggest threat is an increase of as much as one Celsius degree in global average temperature by the end of the century?!!
Translation: Pay no attention to that Maoist behind the curtain! Nothing to see here. Oh, hey, look over there: is that Global Warming??
You forget, to BIDEN and our so-called intel community, ‘WHITE Supremacy is a bigger threat than ALL of islamic terrorism put together..”
FUNNY< i don't remember any hyjackings by white supremacists.
I don't remember any mass bombings by white surpremacists (other than McVey)
I don't remember any kidnappings of kids.. and so on..
BUT I REMEMBER LOTS of those, from ISLAM!
Funny….The last i checked Biden and his former KKK buddies looked pretty WHITE to me. Am I missing something? It would appear the Democrap party is still the official home of racism and slavery. I don’t care what their black plantation overseers like Obama and Sharpton say, The inner city plantations are just getting bigger and bigger along with the looting and arson. No wonder the Black businesses and Black families can’t survive. The Democrap party should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re not.
As the SUN goes into hibernation for the next 30-70 years, I can’t wait to see all those agw fools SHIVERING in the COLD that is COMING! HAHAHAHAHAHA!! I KEPT all of MY winter gear just in case!