Our Health, Our Planet – why health practitioners must act on climate change now (2min)
November 5, 2009 by Liz Nightingale
4 Responses
Leave a Reply
-
Recent Posts
FPH twitter
- @ #MassGatherings panel; high profile speakers will be talking about preparing for London 2012 and beyond. Anything to listen for and share? 5 days ago
- Did you see our past president @amaryond on why prevention is better than statins on BBC Six 0'Clock News on Weds? bbc.in/KkHZRi 5 days ago
- Morning! Back to office today after great day at #Shoes10 yesterday. Seems everyone enjoyed the Dragon's Den: hope the advice was useful. 5 days ago
- MT @rebeccahealthed @Telegraph: quarter of all deaths could be avoided with better healthcare: tgr.ph/MgDLk8 ->with @FPH comment 1 week ago
- MT @L_H_O: See the burden of smoking in England at: bit.ly/ykKVxC -> thanks for the link. 1 week ago
Tags
Categories
- Africa
- Ageing
- Alcohol
- Children and young people
- Chronic Disease
- Climate change
- Disaster relief
- Genetics and public health
- Global Health
- Health and Social Care Bill
- Health Inequalities
- Health Protection
- HIV
- Media and public health
- Mental Health
- Obesity
- Olympics
- PH Spending
- Public Health Events
- Public Health Training
- Uncategorized
- Urban health
- US healthcare
- White Paper
- Women and sport
Archives
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- December 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- August 2009
- October 2007
Disclaimer
I couldn’t find where you worry about the 3000 deaths in English hospitals “as a result of patient safety incidents”, or the superbug deaths or “the 300,000 people who suffer from a healthcare-associated infection every year – 8 per cent of all hospital patients or the up to 20,000 deaths a year from infections not being monitored by the NHS”. Maybe you would be better scrubbing wards instead of arranging agreeable conferences to discuss “big issues”…
Would it be too much to suggest that health practitioners FIRST act on the health issues INSIDE their own area – hospitals – and get them CLEAN and free from the superbugs that infest only NHS but not private hospitals ?
Or does worrying about “climate change” make them so feeble that the mundane, the here-and-now, cannot be dealth with ? I guess moral authority has no impact on MRSA ?
Alan Douglas
How to Doctors become experts on climate change all of a sudden? I’d say it’s called jumping on the lucrative band wagon.
@ The Filthy Engineer, @ Alan Douglas, @ The Englishman:
To say that climate change is one of the biggest public health threats that mankind has ever faced isn’t to deny the impact of other public health problems, such as hospital-acquired infections, on people’s lives. MRSA is an important public health issue, which shouldn’t and won’t be ignored by public health professionals, and this blog will certainly discuss hospital-acquired infections from a health protection point of view in the near future.
But climate change isn’t something that’s happening somewhere far away on the other side of the globe, but is already affecting the lives of people in the UK, here and now.
Consider these health effects of climate change: more cases of asthma and respiratory infections from the warming climate and worsening air quality; risk of contaminated drinking water and water-borne infections from flooding; increased prevalence of food poisoning linked to warmer weather; increased rates of sunburn and skin cancer; injury, disability and even death from extreme weather conditions.
All of these are expected to affect communities in the UK as well as around the world, and are already doing so.
Climate change is a serious health issue and health practitioners are ideally placed to help combat it.