Climate Crisis - A Health Crisis

 Prof Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, the country’s most senior public health expert, said there was a common misconception that a warmer climate would bring net health benefits due to milder winters. But the climate emergency would bring far wider-reaching health impacts, she said, with food security, flooding and mosquito-borne diseases posing threats.

“The heatwave this summer really brought home to people the direct impact,” said Harries. “But it’s the breadth of the impact. It’s not just the heat.” 

This summer, the UK experienced record temperatures of 40.3C and six separate heatwave periods associated with more than 2,800 excess deaths. “If several aeroplanes all exploded and we’d lost that many people it would be front-page news in health protection terms,” Harries said. It is projected that numbers of heat-related deaths will triple by 2050, with the hottest summers on record that we have observed in recent years becoming simply “normal” summers. 

The climate crisis poses a “significant and growing threat” to health in the UK. Harries said the UK needed to build resilience to protect the population from the health impacts of extreme weather events. The aim is not to paint a “doom and gloom scenario”, she added, but to identify threats for which the UK could prepare.

Viewed purely in terms of annual excess deaths, the climate crisis was likely to have an interim benefit in the UK due to warmer winters, Harries said. But other factors could soon reverse this trend. As temperatures rise, Europe is becoming vulnerable to infectious diseases historically seen in the tropics. The Asian tiger mosquito, which carries dengue fever and chikungunya, is now established in southern Europe and this year France experienced its most severe outbreak yet of dengue, which mosquitos can transmit efficiently only when average temperatures rise above 28C.

“In France, they have had cases of infectious disease that you would normally see in tropical climates and the vector has come right up to Paris,” said Harries. “We’re starting to witness the progression of this impact in European countries. In the UK, Asian Tiger mosquito eggs have been detected in the south-east and the Culex modestus mosquito, which can transmit West Nile virus, is present in parts of Kent and Essex. 

“We’ve already beefed up our surveillance programme, but it’s one of those areas where we need to raise the flag and build out capacity in advance,” she said.

Climate crisis poses ‘growing threat’ to health in UK, says expert | Climate crisis | The Guardian