Climate change to affect our health
Climate change is already making its economic impact felt but experts are warning it will soon be wreaking havoc with our health.
A national rural health conference in Albury has heard predictions of deadly heatwaves and the emergence of diseases we’ve never seen before.
Professor Tony McMichael, director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra., painted a daunting picture of the future health prospects for a world gripped by climate change.
”Climate change is not just a threat to our economic system, it’s actually becoming increasingly obviously a threat to our life support system, and if we were to allow current trends to continue, now or over the next few decades we could see some disasters around the world.,” he warned.
Prof McMichael said tropical diseases like dengue fever could spread down the eastern and western coasts of Australia as mosquito populations moved. Overseas, malaria and yellow fever would spread, plus the possibility of new diseases. For cities, the main problem would be heatwaves.
”In Sydney for example, if we look right out to the end of this century, the death rate from extremes of heat would increase we think, at least two fold, and could increase rather more if we don’t manage to curb the world’s greenhouse gas emissions very soon,” he said.
