The Environmental and Energy Study Institute sponsored a Congressional briefing examining the relationship between public health and climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world is getting warmer, eight of the ten warmest years on record occurred in the last decade, and human activities - especially the burning of fossil fuels - are affecting the climate system. A number of studies have examined how global climate change and climate variability affect public health, making this an important issue for policy makers to begin to address.

There are five critical health issues that have been identified: heat-related illness and death; health effects related to extreme weather events; health effects related to air pollution; water-borne and food-borne diseases; and vector-borne (diseases resulting from infections transmitted to humans and other animals by blood-feeding insects) and rodent borne diseases. EESI’s expert briefing panel, which discussed a number of these issues, included:

• Robert K. Musil, PhD, MPH, Executive Director and CEO, Physicians for Social Responsibility



• Devra Lee Davis, PhD, John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, author of "When Smoke Ran Like Water"



• William K. Reisen, Director, Arbovirus Field Station, Center for Vector Borne Disease Research, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California Davis

The potential risks to public health posed by global warming are being researched and documented by scientists the world over. Examples of reports released over the last year, examining these effects, include:

• Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Death by Degrees: State by State Assessments of the Emerging Health Crisis of Climate Change;



• The National Health Assessment Group for the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, Climate Change and Human Health: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change; and



• National Academy of Sciences’s Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, a report prepared for the Bush Administration.

A two-year study just completed by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCES) is the first to analyze disease epidemics across entire plant and animal systems. A conclusion of this study, according to co-author Andrew Dobson of Princeton University is, "climate change is disrupting natural ecosystems in a way that is making life better for infectious diseases."

While adverse health impacts in the United States will be low compared to the global situation, the National Health Assessments Group suggests that by improving the nation’s public health infrastructure and focusing on research gaps, the United States can help to reduce the potential adverse health impacts of climate change and climate variability.