In June, a woman in her 70s came to an emergency room in western Canada dehydrated because of asthma and diabetes. But a record heatwave in the area prompted Dr. Kyle Merritt to admit the woman to the hospital in Nelson, British Columbia, citing climate change as the underlying cause of her condition.
The woman, whose name has not been released, lived in a trailer home without air conditioning. With temperatures exceeding 100 degrees combined with thick smoke from wildfires raging across Canada and the United States, emergency rooms across British Columbia quickly filled up.
Soaring temperatures created a heat dome, breaking records and killing nearly 600 people in British Columbia. In November, the sweltering heat was followed by deadly flooding that killed four people in the province and more than 100 in Washington state.
Because Merritt noted in the woman's medical records that climate change was the cause of her hospitalization, many inside and outside of the profession viewed that as a first-of-its-kind diagnosis.
“I think that we’ve learned that climate change is essentially required in order for it to get that hot where we live,” Merritt said in a recent interview. “Without the heat, she would not have been admitted to hospital. So I thought it was accurate.”
The United Nations' World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 deaths a year are due to climate change, a topic of discussion among world leaders, scientists and others this month before at the United Nations summit on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland.
The conference coincides with the first public mention of Merritt's diagnosis in a press release about a rally the medical activist group Doctors for Planetary Health is planning in Victoria, British Columbia. A second rally was held in Nelson, Merritt's hometown.
Merritt, a member of the team, was interviewed by the Canadian television networks and Yahoo News, which attracted international attention, including in Glasgow. Conference participant Dr. Jay Lemery, emergency physician and co-founder of the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Climate Health Program, said he was struck by Merritt’s boldness.
“It’s a provocative action, but certainly the science is there to substantiate it,” said Lemery, who’s focused on bringing “climate and health data to the bedside.”
Merritt, whose patient was successfully treated, unaware that her diagnosis had caused a stir around the world, said he had received negative phone calls and emails about climate change treatment "as a real thing", but most of the responses were positive. He said he was not aware of any other doctor making such a diagnosis but was certain that others had made the link between climate change and one's health.
“It’s clear to me this could not be the first patient where a doctor considered climate change as an underlying factor,” he said.
Dr. Linda Thyer, an emergency physician and family physician in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a founding member of Doctors of Planetary Health, organized the protest in Victoria, coinciding with Glasgow and attracted the attention of legislators.
“I feel as health care professionals, as physicians, we need to carry our voice to the policymakers, saying that the climate emergency is a health emergency,” she said.
“In an era when Covid-19 vaccinations ignite fierce political debate, the E.R. and exam rooms are probably not the best places to broach the subject of climate change,” Lemery said.
“I don’t have a political agenda,” he said. “I absolutely have a scientific agenda, and the data is there. We know what is happening. We know its impacts.”
Thyer said she is seeing more patients who are suffering the negative effects of global warming, mainly related to respiratory illnesses and mental health.
She said some of her young patients suffer from environmental anxiety, which the Journal of Climate Change and Health describes as climate change-induced distress, in which people become anxious worry about their future.
Indigenous peoples, children and young people are considered the most vulnerable.
“This can involve loss of sleep or appetite, difficulty concentrating, low energy and panic attacks,” said Thyer, a mother of three.
“What do you tell them when they say, ‘Mom, what’s the world going to look like when I’m trying to start a family?’”
Just as smoke from the U.S. wildfires blew across Canada this summer, climate change has already crossed borders. Smoke from the California wildfires reached Boston and New York during the summer.
Marshall Burke, professor of earth system science at Stanford University, says satellite imagery showing the path of toxic smoke from wildfires has allowed researchers to “link up health data we have on the ground to see how many people go into the hospital on a given day.”
“We need to expand our notion of where climate change is going to be important,” he said.
This issue is of interest to doctors and scholars. Lemery's climate and health program at the University of Colorado has five medical scholars, believed to be the first of its kind in the United States. The department plans to offer a diploma in climate medicine next year, said Lemery, co-author of the textbook “Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health.”
“The key is to share and have a health care workforce that is ready for what is coming down the pike,” he said.
You must be logged in to post a comment.