What you Need to Know About Your Health in a Changing Climate

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By Desmond Brown – Executive Editor

PARIS, France, Dec 10 2015, CNS – World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, has told the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) that climate change will kill about 250,000 people globally and 600,000 in the European region annually in the coming years if it is not brought under control.

COP21 is scheduled to deliver a final text Thursday in which all 195 countries that signed to the UN Climate Convention agree on a global plan to combat climate change.

Dr Jakab said this is important because it is very clear that climate change is already having serious adverse impacts on health issues.

“Like you have seen that in 2003 when we had the heat wave here in France it killed 70,000 people in 12 European countries. And it cost a huge amount of money on the economies, both the heat waves but also the floods that we have seen around. Just the floods in the European region which affected 52 out of the 53 countries cost approximately 8.7 million euros between 2000 and 2014,” Dr Jakab said.

“So there are huge economic impacts of the climate change as well but a huge impact on the health of the population.

“If you look at the health issues the most visible one is that you see a different distribution of the disease vectors like for examples ticks, mosquitoes, flies like the sand flies and they spread diseases like chikungunya, like dengue, like all kinds of vector borne diseases.”

Chikungunya, which first appeared in Africa in the 1950s and later spread to Asia, Europe and India, didn’t surface in the Caribbean until late 2013. Then it made up for lost time. Since the initial findings on the French half of the island of St. Martin-St. Maarten, the Pan American Health Organization has tracked more than 1.2 million probable cases in 44 countries and territories throughout the Americas. The CDC lists 25 Caribbean destinations — from Anguilla to the U.S. Virgin Islands — with instances of chikungunya.

Dr Jakab said climate change will also influence the allergic diseases and farmers should also be on the lookout.

“The timing of the plant growth and also the duration of the plant growth will change and it will increase and the availability of the pollens will increase by 10/11 days over the upcoming years and also during the last 30 years we have seen this so this will affect the allergic diseases for sure,” she explained.

“But it will also affect for example the crop yields because they will decrease. In central Asia they may also decrease and probably it is very likely that they will decrease in the southern European countries.”

Dr Jakab said her message to the climate conference is that “the right to health has to be an important component of our work in the upcoming period and also we have to link it to the other multilateral agreements and we have to link it to the implementation of the climate change agreement as well both in the mitigation as well as in the adaptation.

“I hope that there will be a very strong agreement coming out of this conference which will safeguard the planet but also the people in the planet who are our assets and I hope to see a very strong people perspective also in this agreement mentioning specifically health and health as a human right,” Dr Jakab said.