Health Impacts of Hotter Days in the Face of Climate Change: Key Insights and Practical Tips

Health Organization says that climate change is the biggest Health threat facing Humanity, why you may ask well climate change affects the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water that we drink and even our shelter but it doesn’t stop there in the United States.

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Health Impacts of Hotter Days in the Face of Climate Change: Key Insights and Practical Tips Dr Nilu Tumala Advices:Extreme heat is the greatest weather-related cause of death why is that the case? Mentioned respiratory Health cardiac health but you've also talked about the threat to pregnant women Climate change in any surprises

Environmental Protection Agency now says that those effects of climate change impact our physical health everything from our hearts to our sleep patterns to,
Even our pregnancies our next guest studies all of the effects of climate change on our health.

Dr Nilu Tumala Advices:

This summer was full of so many uh heat extremes and poor air quality,
Honestly, it’s hard to pick one specific Health concern related to climate change.

I would say as a physician uh you know climate change is caused by the fossil fuel industry and currently not having a way to sort of effectively transition, our economy away from the fossil fuel industry what I’m most worried about is continued global warming and the impacts that we’ll have on human health.

Extreme heat is the greatest weather-related cause of death why is that the case?

A lot of the records that we saw this past summer, you know climate change was a major contributing factor to that and while there are some other reasons that we experience such intense summer heat extremes uh again the impact of climate change cannot be overlooked and so you know what these heat extremes do to the body is it just presents an incredible amount of thermal stress on the body and so this is especially a concern for anyone who may not be able to adapt to the heat extremes as well so this includes elderly individuals anyone with underlying heart or lung conditions and of course children.

so just for one example you know when someone is exposed to extreme heat their heart has to work a lot harder to be able to get rid of that excess heat and so if they already have underlying heart disease then this puts them at higher risk of developing even worse conditions.

we’ve got the heat and then we’ve got all these wildfires, so that is all the smoke that’s in the air even those wildfires right the hundreds of the wildfires burning in Canada coming over into the U.S we were inhaling.

Mentioned respiratory Health cardiac health but you've also talked about the threat to pregnant women

when the air quality was so poor just because every time she went outside her breathing was impacted and what was really concerning is that it just kept coming back to you know the Wildfire spoke from that really intensified Canadian Wildfire the season which is in again in part due to climate change.

So there’s been really interesting data that we’ve been able to collect over the past uh 10 years or so that have shown that both heat extremes and poor air quality do have a concerning impact on pregnant women. most notably linked to increased risk of low birth weight babies and premature birth.

Climate change in any surprises

One of the most underappreciated things about the public health impacts of climate change is just how widespread the impacts are, so of course you know there’s the concerns with heat extremes and poor air quality.
But as it iridos the throat physician one of the things that I’ve seen a lot is how pollen allergy seasons are getting worse and so allergy symptoms are starting earlier in the year and lasting longer and there’s more pollen in the air due to the effects of global warming.

There’s also been concern for spread of some infectious diseases we just saw in Alaska some homes were being lost to the flooding and intensified hurricanes so these have tremendous physical and mental health impacts, so I think that the breadth of the impacts is one of the most concerning conversations around climate change and is why clinicians like myself are talking about it because we really want everyone to be aware of these public health concerns and then also how to protect themselves from them.

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