Harvard University: Global Warming
Impact of global warming on health debated - 02/21/08
On one hand, Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, argued in prepared remarks that there is real danger in climate change, including heat waves, flooding, and the likelihood that it will open the gates to infectious diseases.
"Climate change is affecting human health indirectly by encouraging the spread of pests and diseases among livestock, wildlife and agricultural systems, forests, and coastal marine life," Epstein said. [Health problems prevented Epstein, the organizer of the session, from attending and delivering his remarks in person.] "Heat waves affect health directly and are projected to take an increasing toll in developed and undeveloped nations," Epstein wrote in his prepared remarks.
Arguing to the contrary, Duane Gubler, who was recently named director of Asia-Pacific Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases in Honolulu, said it's too easy to blame global warming for the dangerous problem of infectious diseases spreading, or re-emerging, in areas where they've been absent for a century or more.
Gubler believes that public health emergencies are arising more often and in more places primarily for reasons other than climate change. And he was very blunt in his assessment. "I've always been the maverick," he said, on the issue of climate change and the spread of infectious diseases, adding that in the 20th century "we had great success in controlling infectious diseases, with the exception of the 1918 flu epidemic.
The answers have little to do with global warming, he said. Instead, they include increases in the population density of vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks, too little attention being paid to public health practices, the increasing crowding of huge cities, genetic changes in disease organisms, the rapid transportation of harmful viruses and bacteria around the globe, and complaisance about the dangers - a sense that infectious diseases had been conquered.
