-: Chair the department of environmental,
agricultural and occupational health.
You know the college was founded in 2007
and when we founded the department,
we very deliberately put agriculture in our name.
Because we feel we have a responsibility to address
the public health concerns
that relate to agriculture.
So I can't help commenting
after listening about forestry,
that one of the things I love living in Omaha,
is if you're on high ground for example,
for those of you that know Omaha,
at 90th and Dodge and you look out over the city,
you see trees.
And it's so beautiful and I really like that a lot.
(laughter)
Anyway, moving on.
So climate change affects human health in two ways.
It can change the severity and the frequency
of health problems that already exist,
in a given climate,
with weather factors.
And it can also create unanticipated
health problems or health threats
in places where they haven't been,
previously they haven't occurred.
So problems, and because of climate change,
problems can occur because of non-climate stressors.
Such as changes in land use,
degradation of ecosystems,
changing conditions in infrastructure,
and changes in agricultural production and livestock use.
Some of the extreme migrations
that are going on in the world today,
are not only because of political turmoil
but also because of the lack of food and water
in places that used to have these things.
So these climate stressors can lead to
extreme heat, poor air quality,
reduced food and water quality,
changes in infectious agents
and displacement of populations.
So some of the health impacts that are detailed
in the booklet, the health section from 2015,
there can be an increase in
heat related illnesses from global warming.
Decreased air quality from o-zone and particulate matter.
This particularly impacts asthma
and cardiovascular diseases.
We have vector born disease transmitted to humans
due to the changes in the density of mosquitoes
and ticks and rodents and other animals.
I'm gonna talk about these in a little more detail
in the few minutes that I have.
And water related illnesses.
Interestingly, at least to me,
the impacts on food supply that lead to
food insecurity and undernutrition,
the rising temperatures not only decrease food safety
by increasing the incidences of food born illnesses
that we're all familiar with,
but additionally crops can be less nutritious
because the rising heat leads to
altered uptake of micronutrients like minerals,
and an increase in carbohydrates
coming from decreased nitrogen content.
So foods, grains that once had relatively
high protein contents and less carbohydrates in 'em,
with the decreased nitrogen
can end up providing you with
the calories from the carbon, but you don't get the protein,
the amount of protein can decrease.
And that can lead to under-nutrition.
And lastly, I'm not gonna come back to this but,
it's been demonstrated that rising temperatures
can lead to higher rates of personal violence
and social disruptions.
So, every year it's estimated that
weather related natural disasters result in
60,000 deaths, mainly in developing countries.
And by the 2090s, climate change is expected
to widen the area affected by drought,
double the frequency of extreme drought,
and increase the average duration of droughts, sixfold.
In the presence of extreme heat, I think we all know this,
but these are the health effects
that you see with extreme heat.
You have loss of temperature control,
you get heat cramps and heat exhaustion
and heat stroke and hypothermia.
And if you've got chronic conditions
like cardiovascular disease, you get into even more trouble.
Naturally this affects the elderly,
children, people working out doors in particular,
and unfortunately the economically disadvantaged people,
because they have fewer resources to deal with this.
Between 2030 and 2050,
climate change is anticipated to cause an additional
38,000 deaths per year due to heat exposure, in the elderly.
In fact in the summer of 2013,
which was the warmest summer in Europe since 1500,
the extreme heatwave in Europe,
caused more than 30,000 death there.
In the elderly in particular.
Also,
we begin to see a fungus
called cryptococcus gattii that normally grows
in the tropics, in the subtropics.
It's now causing diseases in the pacific north-west
because the oceans have warmed.
There have been outbreaks of another microorganism
that causes gastrointestinal disease in oysters.
And these are being harvested now
in the waters off Alaska because those waters are warming.
Sweden has seen an increase in tic born
brain inflammations since the mid 80s
because the tics are now moving into Sweden
that didn't used to be able to go in Sweden
because it was colder.
And as we all maybe are aware,
lyme disease has increased more than three fold
in the United States in the number of high-risk counties.
And this has happened since 1992.
Now almost 50 percent of the counties in the United States
have the kinds of tics that carry lyme disease.
And the problems with drought are expected
to be most severe in the mid west,
but that spills over into the great plains,
particularly Nebraska.
The other problem that you might not think about
is that higher temperatures bring more pollen.
And you make think of pollen as a nuisance,
but pollen also can be a real health problem.
This of course you have not only bigger plants
like ragweed gets bigger when it's hotter,
but it also can grow longer,
so you've got bigger problems
with the airborne kinds of pollen.
Now asthma affects 300 million people around the world.
So this is a, exacerbating asthma is a real problem.
In the past 15 years, on a global level,
diseases transmitted by ticks,
and these include Malaria, Lyme disease
and now the birth defects
that are associated with the Zika virus,
that we never worried about until the last few months,
have led to a twelve percent increase
in disabled life years
and a 20 percent increase in death.
So these aren't trivial effects.
The water related illnesses due to
infectious agents and toxins,
we've seen this in lakes around Lincoln here,
and chemicals introduced by humans also are rising.
And we have this problem that's been alluded to
by several other speakers in terms of variable rainfall.
And the lack of safe water
compromises hygiene,
and increase the risk of diarrhoeal disease.
In fact, diarrhoeal disease kills almost 600,000 children
under the age of five around the world.
And it's thought that climate change is probably going,
in these ways is gonna account for another 48,000 deaths
throughout the year.
Here in the great plains we have these intense rainfalls
that we've been talking about, as I know you're all aware.
But this affects not just the agriculture,
and things like this, but it affects our infrastructures.
For drinking water, handling waste water,
handling storm waters,
and all these can lead to increases in exposure
of water-related pathogens, and chemicals,
and the kind of algal toxins
that are usually by late summer a problem around Lincoln.
So this idea that, not this idea,
this fact that higher temperatures
interfere with the nutritional value of plants,
and you can end up with this so-called 'hidden hunger',
these kinds of deficiencies where particularly children
aren't getting enough protein.
They're getting enough calories
so they don't feel so hungry,
but they're not getting enough proteins and micro-nutrients.
These kinds of things,
they affect the immune system,
they really affect cognitive development,
and they can also be a factor in the prevalence of obesity.
As I was looking at all this,
I found one thing that's better,
out of the climate change, health wise,
in northern Europe, there's less of a season
for the um...
respiratory disease called,
if you're parents you probably know it as RSV,
and it's a common lung infection in children.
There's less of that now because the really cold season
is shorter than it used to be.
So what can we do about all this?
I think it's a very gloomy stuff to talk about.
(laughter)
About my laundry list of gloomy things here.
In the college of public health,
and other public health places,
we're trying to understand how climate changes
are affecting, increasing or affecting
risks to human health.
And of course we still have a lot left to do
that we would like to know more about.
And figure out ways to intervene in these.
It occurred to me that maybe I should mention,
while we were talking about mitigating things
that if you've been on the university of Nebraska
medical center campus, in the last year or so,
and I've been there a long time,
and the campus is almost unrecognizable
because there's so many new buildings.
And despite the fact that our building footprint
has grown so much over last
ten, 15 years,
we're now using less energy than we were before.
So the MED center is really, very consciously,
doing not only mitigation, but really trying to help
with reducing energy costs.
And I think that's a very notable thing,
in terms of trying to deal with this climate change.
The building that I'm in, the college of public health
that opened in 2010 is a LEED certified building,
and I think all the new buildings that are going up are.
The other thing that we're doing, I would mention
it's not exactly directly related to climate change,
but I'm really pleased that
one of the young faculty members in my department
as of July one will have a partial appointment
and an extension here down at UNL,
because we're collaborating on agricultural
problems and projects so that we can
try to make a difference.
So those are my comments,
you also have a copy of what I've just said in your book,
in addition to what's in the report from last fall.
-: Okay? -: Okay.
-: Any, any questions
on this particular topic?
Woman Speaker: Yes?
Voiceover: I guess, with what's been on,
what is causing this meteorite spread of the Zika virus?
I mean I'm not sure it's climate change or what.
I mean all of a sudden it's dominating the news.
(laughs)
-: I think there's two things.
I think part of it is the fact that
we're so globally connected now,
that you can be exposed to the virus in Brazil today
and comeback to Nebraska,
and you're just brought it to Nebraska.
That's part of it.
I think the other part of it is climate change,
now these mosquitoes have been able to move northward
up here into north America, at least southern north America
and they can survive there.
I gather,
this really...
I'm not an expert on this.
I understand that it kinda started over in Africa
where lots of these things do.
It got moved to Brazil, and found lots of habitat in Brazil
that it really liked.
And apparently it's different from,
many of the mosquitoes like to go lay their eggs
in all lakes and things like that.
I grew up in east Tennessee and I had I guess
a charmed childhood there because,
the Tennessee Valley Authority,
they would wait until the mosquitoes laid their legs,
whatever mosquitoes were there,
and then they would very deliberately
drop the level in all the lakes in east Tennessee
so most of the mosquitoes eggs died.
So we didn't really have much of a mosquito problem
back then in east Tennessee.
So anyway, I gather this Zika...
the mosquito that carries the Zika virus,
which apparently can not live as far north as Nebraska,
so we're not in danger from it coming here
and infecting us at this point,
it's just southern Florida and Texas
and all along in there where it's warm enough.
It likes to lay it's eggs
in little bodies of water.
For example, you throw away a candy wrapper
and some rainfall gets in there,
and it loves to go into the shallow places like that.
And just a little big of water.
So it's much harder to eradicate.
You can't just go out and do the kinds of things
that places with mosquitoes have been doing,
you've gotta really go much more aggressively
with a lot more manpower to get rid of them.
And it just mushroomed,
that strain of mosquito in Brazil,
and now it's come north,
and the really scary thing, one of the many scary things
is that it turns out it's not just,
if a pregnant woman gets bitten by a mosquito
and gets infected and then
ends up with a child with a birth defect,
it's that also if her husband went to Brazil
and came back with it, it can be sexually transmitted.
And that just compounds the problem.
And what the virus does,
this is kinda off the subject,
but what the virus does,
(murmuring laughter)
you asked,
is it infects the brain
and then it chews away the brain tissue
in this developing fetus
and then actually even, then the cranium kinda collapses.
Because the brain isn't there
pushing the head to get bigger.
And that's how you end up with the microcephaly
and a lot of the brain's been destroyed.
So,
I gather as I've read about it,
that in the 70s Brazil had this under control.
They had lots of mosquito eradication going
and everything was fine, and then they said,
"gee we don't need to spend money on this
"because we don't have a problem anymore",
and now they've got a problem in spades.
So that's my long answer to your simple question.