Opinion Sur Joven

According to the book of Exodus, when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, God assigned to Moses the mission to free them. But since Pharaoh strongly refused to let them go, God caused ten plagues on that region: invasions of frogs, flies and locusts, incurable boils and darkness, among other calamities, resulted in Pharaoh relenting, who finally freed the Israelites.

The 21st century "plagues", in their agnostic version, are caused by climate change, not a religious prophet. Avian influenza, cholera, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, bubonic plague, malaria, dengue fever or Chagas disease have become scary words because, even if we don’t really know what they’re about, we do know these diseases are lying in wait. Some of them are more common in Latin America, while others are mostly common in Africa or tropical regions. But they are not so far away anymore.

Global temperature and precipitation increase is allowing many diseases to spread towards regions where their presence was unimaginable some time ago.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates there are about 160,000 annual deaths caused by climate change, and that the number will continue to grow until reaching 300,000 by 2030. Some experts consider this estimate to be much lower that the actual numbers, since the WHO report only evaluates the impact of diarrheic diseases, malaria and malnutrition, without taking other factors into consideration.

The deadly dozen

IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, released a report that lists twelve diseases that will become more frequent in our lives due to climate change. Thus, the phenomenon will start to have impacts both to human and wildlife health as well as global economies, according to the organization.

The document –which was released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress, attended by 1,700 researchers- filled the list with: Avian influenza, babesiosis, cholera, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, intestinal parasites, Lyme disease, bubonic plague, red tide, Rift Valley fever, sleeping sickness, tuberculosis and yellow fever.

The IUCN said the best defense against these diseases is “a good offence in the form of wildlife monitoring to detect how these diseases are moving”.

For those of us living in the South Cone, the list seems a bit short. In order to find this out and answer other questions, Opinión Sur Joven interviewed Osvaldo Canziani, PhD in Physics specialized in meteorology and Nobel Peace Price winner in 2007. He’s one of the 2,000 scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who won the prize along with former US Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore, against climate change.

He was IPCC’s co-chairman between 2001 and 2007, and in spite of having left his position he is still related to the organization and participates in the elaboration and revision of reports. He was one of the first Latin Americans to join the organization: “At first there were only three of us; today we’re more than 120”.

Canziani says the “deadly dozen” list is incomplete. “It doesn’t include Chagas disease, leishmaniasis… The problem is the relentless popularization of reports from other regions. They don’t care about our problems, but only about theirs (the IUCN is based on Switzerland)”.

In South America, Chagas disease, dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria, leishmaniasis and schistosomiasis should definitely be part of a list to prevent the “plagues” climate change is helping spread.

“Increasing heat and humidity levels all over the world make vectors (mosquitoes) move more easily. Today we have malaria at an altitude of 3,200 meters above sea level in La Paz (Bolivia), and there’s also malaria in Siberia, for instance”, he explains.

Although climate change is usually related to increasing sea levels and ice melting, increasing global temperatures and fluctuations of rain levels are just as important because they affect the distribution of dangerous pathogens that cause diseases.

Furthermore, according to the 87-year-old scientist, today mosquitoes have become resistant to the fight against them. They have adapted, so “in this context we must be careful because the problem is no longer attacking the disease, but attacking before it spreads”.

For instance, according to WHO reports, 16 million people are infected with the disease or have been infected over the last year in Latin America; in the case of malaria, the numbers grow up to 120 million people in tropical and subtropical regions of the planet.

Another example of disease spread is the map showing the extent of the Aedes aegypti, the mosquito vector of dengue: in 1970, its “area of influence” ranged from southern US (Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas), the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Guayanas. In 2003, the area was extended towards Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.

Water has an essential role in the transmission of these diseases. “Although climate change may cause serious problems, it’s the lack of equality what’s killing us: resources such as water are not redistributed”, says Canziani. Nowadays, every two sick people in the world, one of them is suffering a health problem related to water.

Not only mosquitoes

Fine, increasing heat and rain levels “tropicalize” our climates and raises the amount of disease vectors. However, that’s the beginning of the problem, not the end.

“When extreme or severe weather processes are exacerbated, more health problems are generated because they’re making people live in stressing conditions”, says the Nobel Prize winner.

The WHO defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, including physical and mental health, strongly influenced by the environment. Hurricanes, floods, dust storms, windstorms, wildfires and droughts contribute to affect said “well-being”, apart from destroying biodiversity.

Besides, floods and droughts cause undernutrition or malnutrition in millions of people, as well as large population displacements. Over the next years, according to Canziani, there will be an annual increase of 10 to 30 million people who may lose their lands to floods in the Pacific areas, Africa and South America.

Health is also affected by man’s direct contamination: hydrocarbon combustion chemically deteriorates the atmosphere and an excessive amount of ozone is accumulated; this substance is highly oxidant, affects the trachea and generates cataract problems. That’s why people buying air purifiers -which generate ozone excess- is paradoxical.

Not to mention farming. “Agrochemicals are generating critical situations due to groundwater and air contamination”, Canziani claims. Regarding this situation, the obvious solutions would imply avoiding temperature-raising gases that favor disease spreading, as well as stopping the use of products such as agrochemicals. But it’s a structural problem, which we’ve been claiming forever from this section.

However, another way of helping solve the problem is doing some research. We don’t have reliable statistics in Argentina and Latin America. “Measuring all this would be the first necessary action. You can’t know what you don’t measure. There was never a serious study in Latin America… We have nothing. We have a very vague idea of what’s going on”, the scientist emphasizes.

The less we know how deeply this problem affects us, the less we can understand how to fix it. Health is just another aspect of the climate change phenomenon. In times of international economic crisis, we should remember its importance to counteract some sectors’ request to postpone the fight for the survival of our planet and ourselves.