Suchergebnisse

Climate change is harming human health with disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations. As extreme weather events are projected to increase, acute care services—the primary access point for patients during a disaster—will be increasingly stressed. The authors seek to assess current efforts to build resilience against climate‐related events in emergency units in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). A systematic review was done using Ovid Medline, Embase, Cochrane, and Global Health (CABI), combining LMICs, climate change, emergency care, and resilience terms. LMIC emergency units serve as a ground zero during times of disaster, yet countries have a myriad of emergency care systems, with varied stages of development and a limited capacity for surges in demand. There was little evidence and a paucity of standardization methods for building healthcare facility/system resilience. This study provides policy recommendations for strengthening LMIC emergency care systems to protect lives and advance health equity.

The accelerating health impacts of climate change are undermining global health, and the roles of the health sector in addressing the many challenges of climate change are being articulated by governments, multilateral institutions, and professional societies. Given the paucity of physician engagement on this issue to date, there now exists a clear need for health professionals to meet this new challenge with the development and cultivation of new knowledge and skill sets in public health, environmental science, policy, and communication. We describe a novel GME fellowship in climate and health science policy, designed to train a new generation of clinicians to provide the necessary perspective and skills for effective leadership in this field. This fellowship identifies available university resources and leverages external collaborations (government, medical consortiums, affiliate institutions in public health, and environmental science), which we describe as being replicatable to similar training programs of any number of medical specialties and likewise bring meaningful opportunities to their respective training programs and academic departments. The creation of this novel fellowship in climate and health policy provides a roadmap and potential path for similar programs to join us in addressing the defining health issue of this generation and many to follow.

Climate change has led to significant rise of 0.8°C–0.9°C in global mean temperature over the last century and has been linked with significant increases in the frequency and severity of heat waves (extreme heat events). Climate change has also been increasingly connected to detrimental human health. One of the consequences of climate-related extreme heat exposure is dehydration and volume loss, leading to acute mortality from exacerbations of pre-existing chronic disease, as well as from outright heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Recent studies have also shown that recurrent heat exposure with physical exertion and inadequate hydration can lead to CKD that is distinct from that caused by diabetes, hypertension, or GN. Epidemics of CKD consistent with heat stress nephropathy are now occurring across the world. Here, we describe this disease, discuss the locations where it appears to be manifesting, link it with increasing temperatures, and discuss ongoing attempts to prevent the disease. Heat stress nephropathy may represent one of the first epidemics due to global warming. Government, industry, and health policy makers in the impacted regions should place greater emphasis on occupational and community interventions.