Education environment: asthma media irresponsibility public health
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 23: Good News For The Albuterol Lobby
The Chicago Tribune reprints a story from US News and World Report on (hack! cough! sneeze!) the respiratory impacts of climate change:
A group of lung doctors warned Thursday that climate change will likely lead to an increase in the rate and severity of a variety of respiratory diseases.
“We felt as though the medical community was not understanding how climate change might impact patients and their health,” says Kent Pinkerton, director of the Center for Health & the Environment at the University of California-Davis. Pinkerton says the warning came out of a meeting of top climate change scientists and lung doctors that discussed the potential impacts of global warming on patient health.
“It was an eye opener for us as we began to talk to climatologists and other individuals to find out how climate change can have far-reaching effects,” he says. It’s not just pollution’s impact on air quality that’s causing an increasing number of cases of asthma, allergies and chronic pulmonary diseases, according to the document.
I know a lot of people with asthma. It’s no joke. Neither is this. Sent March 17:
While an uptick in respiratory diseases is already bad news (given that Americans lose millions of work hours and experience more than enough asthma-related misery already), the public health consequences of climate change are only beginning to be understood, and the genuinely scary stuff still isn’t attracting media attention.
It’s not just increased pollen counts ravaging our lungs. It’s disease-carrying insects traveling northward as warmer conditions spread. It’s disruption of monocropped agriculture from extreme weather events; it’s trees no longer protected by winter freezes from destructive beetle pests; it’s droughts and wildfires; it’s the ongoing loss of biodiversity in our planetary environment. Each of these factors is grim enough when considered in isolation — but the complex jigsaw puzzle that is planetary climate chaos has yet to be assembled in the public imagination. Will we put all the pieces together before our civilization is rent asunder?
Warren Senders
environment: allergies asthma denialism hay fever
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 7: Nothing To Sneeze About.
The LA Times notes that the greenhouse effect is going to make allergies more severe.
The sneezing, eye-watering, itchy-throated misery that comes with allergies is on the rise, led by a growing numbers of Americans sensitive to ragweed and mold. And in certain big cities — Phoenix, Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area among them — the misery of ragweed allergies has lots more company than in others, says a new national study.
The study, to be released by Quest Diagnostics Health Trends, identifies the U.S. cities where allergies to ragweed and mold are most common, based on test results for allergens nationwide. Those sensitive to mold were most plentiful in Dallas, Riverside-San Bernardino, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The study found that sensitization to ragweed and mold increased 15% and 12%, respectively, over the study’s four years. That’s consistent with recent research suggesting that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing a dramatic increase in the release of ragweed pollen, while rising temperatures promote an increase in birch tree pollen, a major allergen in Europe.
Aaaaah-choo! Sent May 26:
As the greenhouse effect intensifies, we’re going to be seeing more and more adverse effects at all levels of experience — from disasters at the regional and national scales all the way to upticks in such localized miseries as poison ivy and allergic asthma. It would be nice to think the denialists will relinquish their bizarre conspiracy theories when the pollen count gets high enough, but if increases in the severity and frequency of tornadoes aren’t enough to make them acknowledge the reality of climate change, a few million runny noses probably won’t do the trick. What will it take to get the “climate zombies” in Congress and the media to wake up to the gravest threat our species has yet faced? We’ll probably remain mired in collective inaction until the fossil fuel industry recognizes that species survival is more profitable than extinction. In the meantime, get out your handkerchiefs.
Warren Senders
environment: allergies asthma extreme weather pollen
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 3: A Cashew? A Tissue? A Fichu?
The Sonoma County Press-Democrat reprints a story from the LA times on the likelihood of an increase in asthma from global warming (hotter, wetter weather equals more pollenaceous plants).
Sent February 22:
A person racked by sneezes and coughs, eyes and nose streaming, is a convenient figure of fun for those who don’t suffer from allergies. Global climate change’s effect on the atmospheric pollen count has similar humorous potential — as long as we avoid looking at the ways in which all of us are affected. And it’s not just asthma and allergies. As planetary warming changes our environment in unpredictable ways over the next decades, we can anticipate some of its effects: hotter temperatures will help spread tropical diseases; unpredictable and extreme weather may destroy local infrastructure (impassable roads, unsafe drinking water, rolling blackouts); agriculture will suffer (and food will get more expensive). Any of these by itself is a mere inconvenience. Collectively they are the localized face of a threat that’s planetary in scope, existential in nature. Environmentalists seek to limit the damage; Republican politicians, by contrast, are investing heavily in antihistamines.
Warren Senders
The title references Ogden Nash’s poem “Allergy in a Country Churchyard.”