Page 3363 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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Ten, 20 or 30 years from now there are going to be a lot more customers for our hospitals and our health systems if we do not start some serious thinking on the subject right now. Our lives are going to dramatically change. The flooding in Victoria and Tasmania right now demonstrates that the climate catastrophe that we have warned of for decades is now upon us. Our whole lives are going to have to adapt to living in a warming climate. The question I am asking the government to focus on today is: what does that look like from a public health perspective?
When it comes to the health effects of climate change, we will need a whole-of-society approach. Thinking in silos or with a single-issue focus will not deliver the solutions that we need. It is not going to be enough to know how to treat heatstroke. We are going to need buildings and green spaces that prevent heatstroke from developing in the first place, especially in a hotter world where Canberra might see summer temperatures into the high forties or even the fifties.
Humans cannot withstand a so-called wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees or above for more than a few hours. But what does that actually mean? What does it look like and how can we live within it? To quote from an article in The Economist from May this year:
The wet-bulb temperature is that which would be recorded by a thermometer wrapped around a moist towel. The wetter the surrounding air, the less moisture is able to escape and the higher the wet-bulb reading will be. At wet-bulb temperatures above 35 degrees, it is thought that even young, healthy people will die within about six hours.
A 2010 paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA stated, “At these levels of temperature and humidity the human body switches from shredding heat to the environment to gaining heat from it, even in the shade and next to a fan.” Wet-bulb temperatures this high have already been reported for short periods in some parts of the world, including in Yannarie, near Carnarvon, in Western Australia.
How do we prevent temperatures in Canberra reaching this point, and how do we protect people if they do? Making buildings, public spaces, housing and green spaces cooler is neither quick nor easy. Efforts on that need to ramp up now. We need creative, future thinking and leadership on these issues.
How many heat deaths are we willing to tolerate as a society and how many can our public healthcare system cope with? These are two quite different questions. One is a moral one and one is practical and economic. We have seen both questions asked and answered, at least to a certain extent, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am not sure that the answers have been encouraging, especially as the pandemic has ground on.
Climate change will exacerbate the spread of certain diseases. Many mosquito species are likely to increase their range. Different mosquitoes carry different diseases and do best at different temperatures. Malaria spreads best at 25 degrees, while zika prefers 29 degrees. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is responsible for the transmission of malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus, does not like Canberra at the moment but might love it here in the summer months 50 years from now. The good
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