Keynote speaker Karenna Gore with conference host Robert Wright, MD, MPH.
Global warming is having an increasingly profound effect upon human health, making it harder to breathe, giving rise to more infectious diseases, and even lowering nutritional levels in our food supply.
These were among the many consequences cited on Friday, January 24, when the Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hosted its second annual Clinical Climate Change Conference at the New York Academy of Medicine. The event drew more than 150 clinicians and other members of the U.S. medical community.
“Health care professionals are on the front lines of this planetary health problem,” which is having a disproportionate effect on “the poor, the marginalized, the elderly and infirm, and nonhuman life,” said Karenna Gore, the Conference’s keynote speaker, and the founder and Director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.
She told the audience, “This is no ordinary time and we are together in not knowing how it will turn out. We need you to warn, and we need you to heal.” Ms. Gore is the daughter of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.
Robert Wright, MD, MPH, the Ethel H. Wise Chair of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Director of the Institute for Exposomic Research, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said exposomics—a new field of science that uses technology to measure an individual’s total environmental exposures over their lifetime—could help physicians understand the effects of global warming.
Satellites, for example, are used to help measure a person’s external exposure to air pollution, whereas mass spectrometry is used to measure an individual’s internal chemical exposures. As the field matures, Dr. Wright said, exposomic data will be used more widely to determine cause and effect and monitor the success of interventions.
Dr. Wright shared information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which highlighted the negative impact of extreme heat and air pollution on cardiovascular health and asthma and showed that warmer weather would lead to an increase in tick-and-mosquito-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease and the Zika virus, since insects could live and breed in more places.
Conference attendees gathered at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City.
As a point of reference, Dr. Wright cited the European heat wave of 2003, which led to tens of thousands of deaths. France, he said, had the highest temperatures and the most deaths. Another example, he said, was chronic kidney disease of unknown origin, a progressive loss of kidney function that has killed more than 20,000 people in Central America over the past 10 years, most of whom were agricultural workers.
“The leading theory of the cause,” he said, “is a combination of dehydration and pesticide exposure. With climate change and higher temperatures, workers may be dehydrated for longer periods of time.”
Lewis Ziska, PhD, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and a former plant physiologist at the U.S. Agricultural Service, said increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were creating an imbalance in many plant species that people consume. Rice, wheat, potatoes, and barley, he said, were all showing a decline in protein, nitrogen, sulfur, zinc, and iron. Extreme weather-related events that take place in one part of the continent also affect the health of people living thousands of miles away.
Allan C. Just, PhD, Assistant Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine, discussed the unprecedented Canadian wildfires of 2015, which followed a hot, dry spring. The forest fires burned millions of acres and displaced thousands of people, mainly in Saskatchewan. Airborne particles from the fires spread to the Eastern United States, he said, and led to unsafe levels of air pollution in cities as far away as Baltimore.
In her closing remarks, Ms. Gore reminded the audience of the earth’s interconnectedness. “The climate crisis is a force that will ultimately spare no one,” she said. “Solving it should be a unifying cause.”