Climate change is now having such a profound impact on our health, medical programs are changing the way they teach about it.
Scripps News spoke with an expert in a medical school program dedicated to training clinicians on the health effects of climate change.
“Our program is really focused on trying to scale up a climate-savvy health care workforce,” said Dr. Jay Lemery, the director of Climate Change and Health Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “When we think about climate change and how it affects our health right there, there’s so many different things.”
Lemery said medical professionals need to understand what’s happening to the environment and how that might be affecting their patients.
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“Those extreme heat events can absolutely kill,” Lemery said. “And we’re going to be seeing warmer heat events and more frequently. And I think that that is increasing in the increasing years will be one of the worst scenarios.”
Lemery is among the scientists and health experts across the world saying that climate change is directly affecting our health.
The World Health Organization reports that the changes present a fundamental threat to humans from extreme heat and wildfires to severe storms and hurricanes.
The WHO reports that 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change. And between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year.
But there is a divide.
According to a joint report by Yale and George Mason University, only 52% of Americans think extreme weather poses a high or moderate risk to their community over the next 10 years.
“As the world gets warmer, we’re seeing stronger storms, rising seas, more immigration problems because crop failures and health issues, diseases that would not be in certain areas are moving toward the poll because of a warmer world,” said Mike Nelson, the Chief Meteorologist at the Scripps-owned Denver 7 news station.
Which is why part of the program is to better educate the public and work with broadcast meteorologists to get the word out about the dangers of climate change.
“Television meteorologists have a unique ability and I think responsibility to talk about climate change,” Nelson said. “The trust bridge is important because we can teach our viewers about the impact of climate change on all aspects of life and health. In a warmer world, people that have respiratory problems are going to have more trouble. Kids that have asthma are going to have more problems and diseases are going to spread more rapidly.”
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