Extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes might be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about how climate disruption might impact our health via injuries and fatalities. But the ways that human health is being affected by a changing climate are wide-ranging and sometimes subtly hidden in terms of cause and effect. Extreme heat events tend to create the most fatalities, but we are also seeing growing impacts on health from water quality problems such as harmful algae blooms, rising infections from insect-borne diseases such as Lyme and West Nile virus, and respiratory ailments from increasing air pollution and allergens. Not to mention the mental health impacts from destructive severe weather and environmental degradation.
At the federal level, the CDC had created the BRACE (Building Resilience Against Climate Effects) program, but we will need to have state and local leadership to create new policies and build new infrastructure to mitigate climate impacts (e.g. cooling centers and enhanced water treatment), while also deepening the capacity of the health care sector to cope with higher patient loads from the diverse impacts of a warming climate. Join us on May 13 at noon to hear from state and local leaders on how climate disruption is affecting public health, and what we should be doing to prepare our communities.
Dr. Neil Muscatiello is the Director of the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology at the NYS Dept of Health. Bryon Backenson is the Director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control at the New York State Department of Health, and an Assistant Professor at SUNY Albany’s College of Integrated Health Sciences. Dr. Danielle Eiseman is the Associate Director of the Cornell Health Impacts Core in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. We will also hear from Douglas Barnes, a Senior Environmental Health Specialist at the Tompkins County Health Department.
For education and research:
