"Vaccines Won’t Work for Some Coming Health Threats, Like Climate Change", 23 mars 2020

Some climate-related health crises, like heatwaves, have overwhelmed hospitals, much like the coronavirus...The 21st century is all about preparing for new kinds of events—many related to climate change—that we need to plan for ahead of time... 

Researchers have dedicated much time and resources to the century’s newest, and many say biggest, health threat: climate change...“The challenges that are facing the health profession and public health are coming from outside of the health sector,” said Nick Watts, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London... Medical professionals and institutions are prepared to respond to known threats, not the unknown...

Watts and his team catalogued an array of crises that might appear on a 2099 public-health victory list: heat, wildfires, lethal weather, air pollution and more. To beat them, Watts said that the entire health system may find it productive to move toward preventative care, wherever possible, aided by virtual medicine.  “We had assumed that the environment was going to stay the same because the environment used to stay the same," Watts said. “We didn’t quite appreciate the importance of all of the benefits you get from a stable climate until it started to change...”

The problem is no longer theoretical...During Europe’s historic 2003 heatwave, for example, 70,000 people died. Just like the current coronavirus pandemic, not all those deaths were due to the heat itself. “They died because the health system was overwhelmed,” Watts said. “It’s a very, very similar story to what we’re seeing in Italy.”

Environmental degradation has already been identified as a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic...Unlike measles or polio, there is no vaccine for ecosystem destruction. As Patz and colleagues wrote...“Human-induced land-use changes are the primary drivers of a range of infectious disease outbreaks” and the emergence of new epidemics.