National Nurses United

C A L I F O R N I A N U R S E D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 13 different, there is a nexus between them that sometimes comes out looking like some enormous environmental Rubik's Cube. THE HEAT IS ON Heat is a case in point. The heat that killed four farm workers this past July was hardly the first heat wave to strike California, but if the Union of Concerned Scientists' predictions are accu- rate, such heat waves will be hotter and far more frequent in the future. According to a study of the effects of climate change on health by Laurence Kalkstein and Kathleen Valimont of the Environ- mental Protection Agency's (EPA) Science and Advisory Com- mittee, temperature studies dating back to the early 1960s demonstrate a link between heat and such health problems as heart failure, cerebrovascular complications, peptic ulcers, glau- coma, goiter, and eczema. The heat wave that enveloped Europe in the summer of 2003 killed more than 35,000 people, 15,000 in France alone, an event that Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author Ross Gelbspan says had global warming written all over it. "That heat wave had a very specific signature of human-induced heat- ing," he told Revolution. Gelbspan has worked for The Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, and Boston Globe, and is author of two books, The Heat is On, and Boiling Point. One of the characteristics of global warming is the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), one of the so-called "greenhouse gases." Increasing CO 2 levels, says Gelbspan, causes "nighttime tem- perature levels to rise, so that there is no cooling-off period when the sun goes down. It means there is no recuperation time for people caught in it." CO 2 has risen from 280 parts per million in the 18th centu- ry, to 375 parts per million today. The gas is very stable, lasting upwards of 100 years. The Union of Concerned Scientists study of potential environ- mental and human health effects of global warming as it would af- fect California found that the greatest temperature increases would be in the state's Central Valley. However, it is coastal cities like San Francisco that are predicted to have the highest mortality. Resi- dents in San Francisco, says the report, are unaccustomed to hot weather and housing is not designed to moderate its effects. That mortality will largely fall, according to an EPA study of past U.S. heat waves, on "poor inner-city residents who have lit- tle access to cooler environments." Indeed, the overwhelming majority of those who died in the European heat wave were old and poor. The Union of Concerned Scientists report urges "significant efforts" to provide early warning systems, plus "cooling centers," education and community support systems. Right now, most states do not have any ability to predict heat waves. HARD CHOICES But for cash-strapped public health officials trying to hold the floodgates of HIV and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, killer heat waves and disease-bearing mosquitoes are a bit of an abstraction. O n July 21, farm worker Constantino Cruz put in a nine-hour day. It was the third week of 100 degree plus weather in Shafter, a town in California's fertile Central Valley. At the end of his shift, the 24-year-old fieldworker collapsed. He died 10 days later. Record heat killed three other farm workers that same month. Ninety-degree water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico trans- formed Hurricane Katrina from a troublesome storm to a city killer. July is early in the season for a hurricane, but by July 9, Hurricane Dennis, the earliest recorded hurricane in history, al- ready had pummeled Florida. Public health officials in Colombia are worried because malar- ia-carrying mosquitoes, normally restricted to the wet lowlands, are appearing well above 5,000 feet. Researchers also have no- ticed an increase of ticks bearing Lyme disease in coastal areas of Massachusetts and Scandinavia. Asthma has shown a worrisome jump worldwide, with a dis- turbing trend toward increased lethality. U.S. asthma death rates have risen from 8.2 per 100,000 in 1979 to 18 per 100,000 in 1995, with the heaviest burden, according to the National Insti- tute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, falling on "poor, inner- city African Americans." Heat waves, violent weather, and disease epidemics sound al- most Biblical, but a broad consensus of scientists says all this has less to do with the sacred than the profane: Human activity is heating the world at a dramatic pace, and the healthcare issues of a substantially warmer world are profound. There are a handful of scientists who still resist the idea of global warming, but they constitute, "maybe a half a dozen in the world," Susanne Moser told Revolution. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of scientists are convinced global warming is underway." Moser is with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of the authors of "Rising Heat and Risks to Human Health," a study by the Union of Concerned Sci- entists on the potential impact of climate change on the state of California. "Climate change is big," says Moser, "but you can't see glob- al warming in the same sense that you can see a dirty stream." According to the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global warming "is projected to in- crease threats to human health, particularly among lower- income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries." Tracking the health implications of climate change is a little like that old spiritual: "The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone…" It is enor- mously complex, intricately interrelated, and embraces a stag- geringly-wide number of phenomena. It is also subtle, which makes getting people to take notice difficult. Experts generally break down the health implications of glob- al warming into three broad categories: heat, disease, and extreme weather events, like floods, droughts, and storms. While all are IMAGE COURTESY: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INFORMATICS. HTTP://WWW.DIGITAL-TYPHOON.ORG/

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