Heat can be deadly, killing more people every year than other climate hazards. But as warmer days become our new normal — or, as some climate scientists say, our “new abnormal” – the harmful effects of higher temperatures on our bodies can persist for much longer than we imagine.
The World Health Organization says that climate change is “the greatest health threat facing humanity”. And while that may seem like a stretch, experts say it’s not that far-fetched.
“There are really direct relationships between climate and health, and what we’re seeing in many cases we might call ‘climate-exacerbated illness,’” said Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, director of emergency preparedness for emergency medicine at Columbia University, to Yahoo News. .
Why extreme heat is bad for your health right now
Walking outside on an extremely hot day, it’s easy to see how excessive heat can cause immediate damage. Insolation and heat exhaustion may be among the first conditions that come to mind. Insolation, which occurs when the body loses the ability to cool and control its temperature, can cause permanent disability and even death, with body temperature possibly rising to 106°F or more in as little as 15 minutes. Heat exhaustion, which includes symptoms such as dizziness, nausea and headache, can cause heatstroke unless treated immediately.
But extreme heat can also be harmful in less obvious ways and can have a big impact on chronic disease.
“Heat puts stress on your body, and when your body is stressed, it has a hard time dealing with other things, like heart or respiratory problems,” Tedeschi said. “When you look, for example, at emergency room visits during periods of extreme heat, more people have heart attacks, more people have strokes, and that’s frankly just a reflection of the stress on the body.”
Higher temperatures also often lead to poorer air quality, with extreme heat and stagnant air increasing the amount of ozone and particle pollution. And after having endured scorching heat, all that heat can harm your sleep Also, even mild exposure to heat keeps body temperature elevated, affecting sleep stages and hindering the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.
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How high temperatures harm your long-term health
“On an individual level, I think it’s heat stress over a long period of time,” Tedeschi said. “If you’re continually exposed to extreme heat or high temperatures that your body can’t handle, I think that frankly puts you at risk for things that your body might otherwise be able to avoid.”
There are also more downstream effects. Wildfire smoke – which has become an all-too-familiar problem across much of the US as fires continue to rage burn in Canada and California – has harmful health consequences when these dangerous gases and fine particles are inhaled, and the impact of poor air quality caused by smoke can also be harmful in the long term.
“There are probably some long-term effects of these small particles that we don’t yet fully understand,” Tedeschi said. “They penetrate deeper into the lungs, likely cause more inflammation and may be responsible for more chronic disease. Coupled with the heat, it’s a really dangerous combination.”
Heat and drought — which have been linked to climate change — are also prime conditions for a more intense wildfire season, and are expected to worsen as our planet warms, with Natural Resources Agency of Canada saying that climate change could double the amount of area burned every year by the end of this century.
“I think about children who are chronically exposed to poor air quality, and that is absolutely a risk for chronic asthma,” Tedeschi said. “If we look at asthma rates and the heat index and access to green space, there is a lot of correlation. Therefore, I worry about the fact that children, for example, are exposed to poor air quality, in such a way that they either develop respiratory problems, or those that they already have, throughout their lives, may worsen.”
The milder winters and earlier springs that provide a ripe wildfire season are also giving disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes and ticks the opportunity to thrive longer and expand their habitats into new, warmer corners of the world. USA. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that between 2004 and 2018, reported illnesses from mosquito, tick and flea bites more than doubled, to more than 760,000 reported cases across the country.
And that’s not all that’s growing as temperatures rise. The emergence of new, sometimes deadly fungi with the ability to infect humans is now a major concern for the World Health Organization, with Dr. Andrej Spec, an expert on fungal infections at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. fungi: our body temperature.”
Fungi, Spec explained, do not do well at 98.6°F – the average body temperature of humans – and thrive best at temperatures around 77°F. But more and more cases of extreme heat are eliminating fungi that can only survive in a temperate environment and allowing the development of more heat-resistant fungi.
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The myriad of health problems arising from increasingly extreme heat will also exacerbate another separate problem that has been criticized by doctors and medical professionals for years – the shortage of health professionals.
“Across the country, our emergency departments are overwhelmed, overwhelmed and overcrowded,” Tedeschi said. “And when you think about an event that could send an excess of people to an emergency room, like a heat wave or poor air quality event, overcrowding in our emergency rooms is probably one of our biggest risks when it comes to mitigating these climate disasters.”
