With health care reform consuming the domestic political discourse, the nation’s gaze is turning toward doctors and insurance while energy and environment are (at least momentarily) eschewed.
But according to Dr. Jonathan M. Samet of the University of Southern California Institute for Global Health, concerns about climate change and public health overlap. Samet says that, while changes to the environment aren’t expected to create new health threats, they will change distributions of factors that cause existing public health issues.
In Adapting to Climate Change: Public Health, Samet suggests that as understanding of climate change evolves, so will tools to combat new health concerns in key areas such as heat, aeroallergens and allergic diseases, changes in endemic and epidemic infectious diseases, and ambient air pollution.
Read more and download Samet’s full report.
“Adapting to Climate Change: Public Health,” is an installment from a six-part series of U.S. climate change adaptation policy reports.
