Weaver Shell | València (EFE).- The climate crisis already has a direct and indirect impact on people’s health and promotes the spread of tropical and parasitic diseases, a “worrying” situation because it is a “complex and heterogeneous phenomenon that it is too late to reverse.”
However, it can still be “mitigated” so that it does not go so fast, according to EFE, according to the president of the World Federation of Tropical Medicine and expert of the World Health Organization (WHO), Santiago Mas-Coma, for whom the The vast majority of countries “are not responding” to what in their opinion is “the world’s number one priority for years: the impact of climate change.”
The expert warns of the different effect of this global problem: while in Southeast Asian countries it results in monsoons and torrential rains, in the Andean region it does so in a severe drought that is forcing a change in the power source, and in the south of Europe is reflected in the high temperatures and warming of the Mediterranean Sea.
How drought changes diet
Más-Coma has recently been in Bolivia, where he has led an official expedition of the World Health Organization (WHO) that, for about a month, has analyzed the effects that the drought is having in a rural area 4,000 meters above sea level. altitude, next to Lake Titicaca.
There, the drought does not allow its population, the Aymara, to produce potatoes, an essential food, which has led them to “change their survival: from depending on vegetables they now depend on livestock, and they have significantly increased the number of cattle and sheep.
“This has a huge impact on zoonotic diseases, typical of animals and that, in rural areas of this type, easily pass to humans,” says the expert, who this week participated in the fourth International Cooperation Congress held in Valencia.
As he explains, in that place the climate crisis causes “an indirect effect on food. People have to change their main source of food, which increases the risk of animal diseases passing on to humans.”
The impact of rainfall
On the other hand, the expert continues, climate change is “having a great impact” on the area that goes from Pakistan to the Philippines and has turned it into a “hot area in the world”, but not because of the high temperatures, but because of the rainfall.
In November of last year, Mas-Coma worked as a WHO adviser in the Philippines, in the area of Southeast Asia where monsoons are abundant and whose frequency and intensity are changing, since “they start earlier, end later and are much more intense ” and can give rise to epidemics due to waterborne diseases.
As he explains, the cases of the Andes and Southeast Asia are “brushstrokes” to reflect that the climate crisis is “very complex and global, worldwide” and that in the case of southern Europe it essentially affects temperatures .
In this last aspect, the professor of Parasitology at the University of Valencia (UV) stresses that the increase in water temperature in oceans and seas, such as in the Mediterranean, is “very worrying”.
Vector-borne diseases
Regarding vector-borne diseases, those caused by arthropods, insects or molluscs, Santiago Mas-Coma explains that the change in temperature regime “modifies the populations of these vectors.”
In the event that this modification is in the direction of favoring its multiplication, it means that “you have more populations of vectors and more transmission of the disease, and therefore the prevalence and intensity rises and at the same time the geographical distribution expands.”
Potential tropical diseases
Remember that the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), based in Stockholm (Sweden), has a list of 400 diseases with the potential to enter Europe, including malaria, schistosomiasis, the disease Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, West Nile virus or yellow fever.
Regarding the vectors, he points out that they are invertebrates with a “very restricted” range of temperature and humidity, which means that they survive at a determined minimum and maximum temperature and, therefore, “if the temperature regime changes, the populations are modified of these vectors.
“Climate change and rising temperatures are promoting the entry into Europe of diseases that until recently occurred especially in tropical and subtropical areas,” he adds.
Are there reasons to worry?
The WHO adviser answers with a resounding “no” to the question of whether the situation can be reversed. “People have to get into their heads that we have taken too long and we are talking about a phenomenon that has too much power. Man cannot modify a thing on this scale, it is impossible”.
However, he adds, “what we can do is mitigate it so that it does not go as fast as it is going”, although he affirms that to achieve this it would be necessary for those responsible for the administrations “to agree. Is this workable? Let’s be pragmatic, not even in dreams”.
“We scientists are crying out and we do not stop making international publications on the impact of all this to tell the rulers that either they take action on the matter or we are all going to have a very bad time,” he warns.
To alleviate the drought, one of the solutions he proposes is to increase the number of desalination plants, “which work at zero cost because all the energy is obtained from solar panels”, and he recalls that Spain was the largest producer of renewable energy in the world “until that a minister came up with the idea of putting a solar tax and we have gone backwards”.
It also underlines the importance of tropicalized air conditioning units (which can withstand values of up to 60 degrees) due to the progressive increase in temperatures. EFE