As our planet gets warmer and warmer, we see in real time the myriad ways our climate is changing. An unbearable hot summer, extreme cold, more dangerous natural disasters. And so are us when our environment changes – especially regarding our health.
Valley fever, a fungal disease that invades our lungs, is one of these less obvious public health concerns. My former colleague Kellen Landman reported in 2023 that my former colleague Kellen Landman is predicted that fungi that are normally found in the western United States will spread to new frontiers across the country. .
At the time, I knew that climate change was doing. Some A kind of role. Now there is more evidence coming about this looming public health threat. last week, American Medical Association Journal (Jama) valley fever, which ignored valley fever, and by deputies, presented briefs aimed at practicing doctors who drove home how other illnesses like it were ignored.
California's Department of Public Health recorded more than 9,000 cases of valley fever in 2023, according to the brief. In the same year, California was hit with multiple storms that drenched the state for weeks after a prolonged drought that began in 2020. Infection in order of growth.
Early recorded cases of valley fever date back to the 1890s. For some people, it is completely asymptomatic. But for others, valley fever can cause symptoms for weeks or months. And there are a few unlucky people whose infections are labelled outside the lungs, in the skin, bones, or brain. Serious cases can be life-changing and even fatal.
Simple things say that volley fever has been diagnosed quite a bit. Cases can be 10-18 times higher than the 10,000-20,000 cases reported to the CDC each year. Symptoms are similar to other respiratory infections, so doctors may miss the signs: cough, fever, fatigue. That really delays treatment for people who need it.
“There are people who get the truly debilitating form of this disease that they are being treated for life. They're coming and going to hospitals,” says Harbor Ukra Medical Center's infectious disease doctor and Valley. said Pamela Lee, one of the authors of Fever Briefs. “And one thing that bothers me is that sometimes people can almost reject the illness.”
Climate change is doing more than simply making the days hotter or the weather even more extreme. It changes how existing diseases grow and spread, increasing the burden on often underprepared communities and health institutions. In addition to valley fever, harmful algae flowers have worsened in places like Florida, spreading malaria and dengue fever in non-explosive areas, and the inability to air pollution that is already common in the eastern North Carolina. We see hot days that exacerbate equality. .
Despite how important this intersection between climate change, disease and health is, there is still a challenge from science to politics when conducting research that unleashes these connections. It is not enough to observe these new risks. Quantifying the health effects of neglected diseases and public health outbreaks caused by climate change is a way to understand how we adapt and the scale of the imminent risks ahead. It's important.
“I think this is another of these kinds of things that need to be considered as a general, chronic threat that is more risky than others, but no one is completely free from risk. ” Daniel said. Co-author of Swain, Brief and Future Perfect 50 Honor.
Coccidioids, a fungus that causes valley fever, live in soils of arid countries. When fungal spores on the ground are often dispersed in the air by wind or human activities such as construction projects or agriculture, only the infecting spores need to be inhaled.
However, it is the time of weather whiplash that drives the growth of coccidioids. It's a rapid swing from one weather to another. In the case of fungal spores that cause valley fever, shifting from very dry to very wet weather is the perfect condition for coccidioids to flourish.
“In reality, it's not enough to dry all the time, and the fungus doesn't actually grow, and it's not enough to be wet all the time, or it won't aerosolize,” Swain says. . “In fact, it is necessary to have these transitions between wet and dry in some way.”
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People who have jobs destroying soil in valley fever hot spots are at a higher risk of infection, such as construction workers and farm workers. These workers also tend to have challenges when accessing healthcare, making them more likely to receive diagnosis and treatment if necessary.
“These are the types of patients I'm always looking at, just going to the doctor and taking away my daily income, and they can't afford it,” Lee told Vox.
But as our climate changes, researchers hope to see more than an increase in the number of cases. They predict that infections will bounce beyond current geographical boundaries. Valley Fever could spread to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Dakotas over the next 75 years. This is a public health issue, crossing borders that have never been seen before. “This is an example of what we were sure was 100% long, but we have a much greater public health burden than before and are expanding into new areas,” Swain said. I did.
The spread of valley fever also imposes financial costs. One study suggests that the economic burden associated with valley fever in response to climate change could reach $18.5 billion per year by 2090, from direct costs such as hospitalizations to overhead costs such as loss of income. got it. Yes, one illness alone costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Valley fever is one unique disease. Now, imagine the human and economic victims of heating planets that exacerbate the spread of other illnesses and public health crises. It's clearly a massive crisis, but it's something researchers are still trying to quantify.
Unhealthy planets, unhealthy people
It is clear that our changing climate has had some impact on human health. But researchers still understand exactly how climate change plays a role, and to the extent it promotes infection and death.
Colin Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University's School of Public Health, says that while researchers know that they are climate sensitive, how climate change still stems from the burden of these diseases It states that there are no observational epidemiological studies yet to show more specificity. .
“There's a huge amount of literature on climate and health,” Carlson told Vox. “There's not much climate literature. change And healthy. ”
Carlson maintains a database of research that brings together this particular literature, called the Health Attribution Library. The papers in this database quantify the human-focused effects of human-focused climate change on human health (e.g. deaths, injuries, infectious diseases, etc.). There are attribution studies to dengue, malaria, fever deaths, and fire-related deaths caused by air pollution, but other diseases such as cholera, yellow fever and the West Nile virus. Beyond infectious diseases, public health concerns such as depression and sudden rises in anxiety can also be attributed to climate change.
“We know there is a huge, strong relationship between temperature and suicide, but there is no global estimate of the number of suicides that can be attributed to temperature due to climate change,” Carlson says.
Part of the problem of doing research that affects health is that ultimately it is difficult to do. One of the major challenges researchers encounter is the lack of long-term, large-scale data. Carlson added that his lab conducted attribution studies on malaria. It was Data to use.
Of course, there are other challenges than science. The Trump administration's latest policies and actions will not work out over the next four years of progress in climate and public health at home and abroad.
“I think the intersection of climate change and public health is particularly concerning. “Together, they pose a huge threat to health and the US economy.”
While many uncertainties lie ahead of the future of climate and public health research, and ahead of the future of human health, Carlson says that attribute research is the key to progress for people whose lives are harmed by climate change. He adds that this could happen.
“These attribution studies are extremely useful in a legal setting, as they can demonstrate that plaintiffs have a basis for their damages,” he said. “When climate lawsuits were successful, it was often behind health.”
People in the health field, such as clinicians and epidemiologists, will also focus on communicating climate change risks to human health to other physicians, patients and communities, as did the authors of Valley Fever Briefs. You can do it.
“You can't have a healthy human on an unhealthy planet,” says Lee. “What we do, what we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink — these things affect our health.”
