20 March 2024
Healthy Debate this week featured an article about the integration of planetary health into medical school programs, but also note that more could be done in terms of helping future physicians understand climate justice. The authors report that 16 of 17 medical schools have already implemented planetary health into their curricula. Importantly, they highlight the role of anti-oppression approaches to social and community justice and how that relates to planetary health. Finally, the authors present three 'calls to action', from their perspective as medical students, that would be beneficial in integrating planetary health and anti-oppression ideas. Really important area of work and well worth a read.
This article in JAMA about infectious diseases discusses the the importance of climate change, how it relates to changing weather, and the effect that this changing climate will have on infectious disease epidemiology. The authors provide a really nice summary table that shows how changes in the climate will affect infectious disease epidemiology, and then provide a number of examples for each. This is a really good example of how climate change and its associated changes in weather patterns or significant weather events will have direct impacts on health.
Lastly, this article isn't necessarily healthcare related but will have important implications for populations all over the world. In it, Gavin Schmidt discusses why the planet warmed more than climate prediction models expected. He gives some potential causes for the unexpected warming and also highlights that the data that's required to truly assess what might have happened has far too long a lag time on it and that better, quicker collection is needed.