NEW DELHI, MARCH 30: Changing climate patterns can lead to disastrous health impacts, especially in developing countries like India, a leading scientist has warned, and urged governments and policy makers to pay more attention to researching the linkages between climate change and public health.
Prof Anthony J McMichael, a fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra, says countries like India can see the outbreak of new diseases or the advent of diseases which were previously not prevalent in this region because of increase in global temperatures.
“We have already seen a marked increase in extreme weather events like heat waves which has resulted in loss of lives. We know that a few infectious diseases are changing their geographical localities. The health aspect needs greater attention while debating strategies to counter the effects of climate change,” Prof McMichael said during an interaction with The Indian Express.
A member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Prof McMichael has contributed to the last three assessment reports brought out by IPCC. He was in India last week to deliver the Foundation Day lecture of the Public Health Foundation of India on the same topic.
Lamenting that the health aspect of climate change was not getting as much attention as it should, McMichael said it needed to be fed more prominently into the mitigation debate. “The impact of climate change on human health can be direct as in extreme weather events like heat waves, or indirect like outbreak of diseases because of changes in the food producing systems or changes in the disease producing organisms. Health concerns also arise as consequences of displacements caused by climate change,” he said.
