Health Care Needs To Lead The Fight Against Climate Change

[From Forbes] As we continue to learn more about climate change, we are realizing it is fundamentally a health issue that will affect everyone in the world. How it is damaging to our health depends on where we live. If we live in Beijing or Baton Rouge, climate change looks like air that’s so thick and poisoned we can’t go outside of our homes. If we live in the Midwest of the United States, climate change looks like extreme weather that rages through our communities and heat waves that destroy our crops and cause heat exhaustion. If we live in New York City, climate change looks like a massive hurricane, which flooded our streets, trapped us in homes with no power and shut down our hospitals. For many communities living downwind from coal power plants, processes that affect climate change are more local and look like increased asthma in our children and respiratory disease in our most vulnerable citizens. We are learning that climate change is already leading to the spread of mosquito- and other vector-borne infectious diseases like Dengue fever and malaria to places that have never seen these diseases before. We are learning it’s not possible to support people on a sick planet...(Continue reading)