Climate change exposures, chronic diseases and mental health in urban populations -- a threat to health security, particularly for the poor and disadvantaged.
Year:
2009
Summary
Summary
Climate change and health has been given increasing attention during recent years, largely initiated and triggered by the insightful report by McMichael and colleagues published a decade ago. Until then research on, and analysis of, the impacts of climate change had focussed on environmental change and impacts on ecosystems.
Global climate change is progressing and health impacts have been observed in a number of countries, including Australia. The main health impacts will be due to direct heat exposure, extreme weather, air pollution, reduced local food production, food- and vectorborne infectious diseases and mental stress. The issue is one of major public health importance. Adaptation to reduce the effects of climate change involves many different sectors to minimise negative health outcomes. Wide-scale mitigation is also required, in order to reduce the effects of climate change.
The “high occupational temperature health and productivity suppression” programme (Hothaps) is a multi-centre health research and prevention programme aimed at quantifying the extent to which working people are affected by, or adapt to, heat exposure while working, and how global heating during climate change may increase such effects. The programme will produce essential new evidence for local, national and global assessment of negative impacts of climate change that have largely been overlooked.
Background: Global climate change is already increasing the average temperature and direct heat exposure in many places around the world. Objectives: To assess the potential impact on occupational health and work capacity for people exposed at work to increasing heat due to climate change. Design: A brief review of basic thermal physiology mechanisms, occupational heat exposure guidelines and heat exposure changes in selected cities.
Global climate change is progressing and health impacts have been observed in a number of countries, including Australia. The main health impacts will be due to direct heat exposure, extreme weather, air pollution, reduced local food production, food- and vectorborne infectious diseases and mental stress. The issue is one of major public health importance. Adaptation to reduce the effects of climate change involves many different sectors to minimise negative health outcomes. Wide-scale mitigation is also required, in order to reduce the effects of climate change.
Background: Social and environmental changes have accompanied the ongoing rapid urbanisation in a number of countries during recent decades. Understanding of its role in the health-risk transition is important for health policy development at national and local level. Thailand is one country facing many of the health challenges of urbanisation. Objective: To identify potential associations between individual migration between rural and urban areas and exposure to specific social, economic, environmental and behavioural health determinants.
Global climate change will increase outdoor and indoor heat loads, and may impair health and productivity for millions of working people. This study applies physiological evidence about effects of heat, climate guidelines for safe work environments, climate modeling, and global distributions of working populations to estimate the impact of 2 climate scenarios on future labor productivity. In most regions, climate change will decrease labor productivity, under the simple assumption of no specific adaptation.
the official picture Work related injuries and diseases come in many different forms and are often difficult to record, because other causal or risk factors than work are also involved. A worker injured by machinery inside a factory will clearly be classified as an occupational injury, but what if the worker was injured in a car crash driving between two worksites during working hours? It is likely that this will be classified as a traffic injury rather than as an occupational injury. Similarly, if an insulation worker who smokes develops lung cancer or