Climate change negatively impacting health

Triggers:

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

It didn’t take NNaserri Carew-Johnson long to learn how to discern the role the environment played in the length and severity of her asthma attacks or whether she had one at all.

From the day's pollen count to sudden changes in the seasons, she knew to be on high alert and keep her inhaler nearby.

“She learned very early on to police herself,” said her mother, Vicki Carew of south Fulton County. “She knows what symptoms to look for and what the triggers are, including climate change.”

That alone might put the 16-year-old far ahead of most of us.

While the majority of Americans think of melting snow caps and helpless polar bears sweltering under rising temperatures, climate change experts and a growing number of physicians are trying now to shift the conversation away from an environmental and national security issue to one of public health.

Here’s why: Climate change will, absent other changes, amplify some of the existing health threats the nation now faces, said Dr. George Luber, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Climate and Health Program.

Children like NNaserri, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color are especially vulnerable, he said.

“Some of these effects on health are already underway in the United States,” Luber said. “Children, primarily because of physiological and developmental factors, will disproportionately suffer from the effects of heat waves, air pollution, infectious illness, and trauma resulting from extreme weather events.”

According to the Georgia Department of Public Health, nearly 1 in 10 children in Georgia has asthma, and African- American children are twice as likely as white children to have asthma.

Asthma, which affects the lungs’ airways, is considered the most chronic condition among children and the No. 1 cause of school absenteeism.

Dr. LeRoy Graham Jr., a pediatric pulmonologist and associate clinical professor at Morehouse School of Medicine, said the prevalence of asthma among Georgia children is now 12 percent, one of the highest in the nation.

“When I came in 1993, it was 6-7 percent,” Graham said. “It’s undeniable that people living in the urban core, concentrated around central transportation corridor are at even greater risk of being diagnosed with asthma and dying from the disease.”

Not only is asthma more common in African-Americans, it is more common for all children living in congested urban environments, Graham said. And African-Americans as a group are two to four times more likely to be admitted to the hospital or emergency room for asthma and two times as likely to die of asthma, nationally.

Laura Seydel, who co-founded Mothers & Others for Clean Air with Stephanie Blank, has been working to improve the state’s air quality since 2004.

“In the early 2000s, you couldn’t turn on the news in the summer without hearing a forecast for a code red or a code purple day for air quality in Atlanta,” Seydel said. “In 2014, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America ranked Atlanta 13th among the largest 100 U.S. metro areas as the most challenging place to live with asthma.”

Seydel said medical studies confirmed what they already knew — that air pollution increases the risk of underdeveloped lungs, diminished lung function and other respiratory symptoms in healthy children.

The women founded Mothers & Others for Clean Air, a program of the American Lung Association, to help raise awareness about the negative health impacts of air pollution and to create change.

“Children should get to be children, and part of being a child is playing outside,” Seydel said.

Because children like NNaserri, a track and field enthusiast, spend more time outdoors and breathe in more air than adults, they are particularly susceptible to air pollution.

Seydel said that while overall air quality has improved, more needs to be done to ensure everyone can breathe cleaner air every day.

“We have learned that even lower levels of air pollution are harmful,” she said. “The other threat comes from unregulated carbon emissions, which hurts us all because it contributes to global climate disruption, leading to rising temperatures, more air pollution, more frequent extreme weather events like we’ve seen here at home in the Southeast, and contributing to the spread of certain diseases. We are also likely to see more pollen and mold affecting children with allergies.”

As she’s gotten older, NNaserri has fewer asthma attacks, her mother said, but only because she has remained diligent in sniffing out her triggers, including milk protein and sudden changes in the weather.

“It’s times like these, when we go from winter to summer in one week that always seems to impact her,” said Vicki Carew.

Even though 97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening, she and others fear the issue isn’t being taken seriously enough.

“Climate change or global climate disruption is a threat to public health — it’s not just about polar bears anymore,” Seydel said.

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