Respiratory allergies, cardiovascular diseases… Climate change has catastrophic repercussions on health.
- Record temperatures will be more frequent in the coming decades.
- In addition to the visible effects on people’s livelihoods, global warming is likely to have a strong and direct impact on human health, warns the United Nations.
It is one of the greatest threats to human health. This is not the trailer for yet another disaster movie but the words used last year by 200 scientists in a grandstand published by The Lancet and intended to show the reality of the dangers that climate change represents for humans.
Thermal stress, respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases… The list is long and is based on facts whose consequences we are already suffering today.
Five million
Heat waves, such as the one we are currently experiencing, are already killing more than five million people each year and their repercussions are numerous.
First on sleep and it’s not trivial: a study conducted in 2022 found that rising temperatures due to climate change significantly reduce the amount of sleep people around the world have. However, these shorter nights of sleep over an extended period end up having harmful consequences on the body’s immune system.
Particularly exposed
The activity of the heart is also disturbed by the thermal stress caused by high temperatures: when it is hot, the heart must pump harder and faster to redistribute and increase blood flow to the skin in order to cool the body. Thus, people with heart disease are particularly at risk of heart failure.
In addition, with the heat, air pollution increases and with it the risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases because the blood vessels narrow and harden, according to a study of 2018.
Unheard of on Earth
Respiratory problems are also to be feared. Indeed, the rise in temperature leads to air pollution which itself causes disorders such as asthma, rhinosinusitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or respiratory tract infections. “High temperatures also increase ozone concentration, which can damage lung tissue and cause complications in asthmatics and people with respiratory conditions.”, alert the United Nations.
Moreover, with the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reaching in May this year a level not seen on Earth for about 4 million years, according to American specialists, allergy symptoms (cough, itchy eyes, headaches and earaches) increase and worsen.
Mental Health
And mental health is no exception. Whereas, after a studyeco-anxiety is on the rise especially among young people as 60% of 10,000 young people from countries around the world feel very or extremely concerned about climate change, mental health issues are getting worse.
Indeed, global disasters such as forest fires, floods or hurricanes that we are currently experiencing can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even suicides. For example, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the worst disasters in American history, researchers found that at least 90% of the 8,000 patients treated following Katrina suffered from long-term anxiety.
