Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Research public health issues on the “Climate Change” or “Topics and Issues” pages of the American Public Health Association (APHA) website. Investigate a public health issue related to an environmental issue within the U.S. health care delivery system and examine its effect on a specific population. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

ORDER  HERE A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

Write a 750-1,000-word policy brief that summarizes the issue, explains the effect on the population, and proposes a solution to the issue.

Follow this outline when writing the policy brief:

Describe the policy health issue. Include the following information: (a) what population is affected, (b) at what level does it occur (local, state, or national), and (c) evidence about the issues supported by resources.
Create a problem statement.
Provide suggestions for addressing the health issue caused by the current policy. Describe what steps are required to initiate policy change. Include necessary stakeholders (government officials, administrator) and budget or funding considerations, if applicable.
Discuss the impact on the health care delivery system.
Include three peer-reviewed sources and two other sources to support the policy brief.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Climate change is what the word itself describes. The change of the weather conditions that happen over a certain time but what is usually not defined in any textbook or search engine is the effects. Public Health and its goal are to avoid diseases, improve the population’s health, and helping people live longer. This is an international issue that is affecting our neighborhood rapidly. The question here is why aren’t health professional ’s taking action if it’s a known threat? What should they do to solve the condition we’re in? Depending on our situations recently, its imperative that the correct steps be taken to solve this problem. Climate change has taken a toll on its population’s health and everything accomplished to this point with science and technology may seize to exist. Around the world, the warmer temperature is creating and complicating a whole host of health challenges, many of which have been all too obvious these past few years. The scientific community is probably in agreement that the climate is changing and the contributions from its population are what is speeding up the process Opinions expressed don’t necessarily reflect the views of editors in magazines such as TIME. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Certain health effects can be minimized or avoided with change and strategy big enough to make a difference. Climate change had been classified as one of biggest threats to the population’s health, the evidence being floods, droughts, and more air-borne diseases, which will keep and has rolled over year by year. In the end, these extremities have even brought death. Drastic weather conditions leading to natural disasters in countries like Puerto Rico which has been the latest one. Air, water, and soil pollution have become the main cause of death of many. At this rate, numbers will keep growing as the world’s climate keeps shifting. Climate Change has become more man-made than natural and now because of it, we are at risk. Only we can put an end to this madness. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

The scenarios that can occur due to climate change are many when it comes to the public’s health. Food production, this effect can pretty much affect humanity as well know it can cause mass extinction. In countries like Haiti, DR, Cuba, PR, and many other islands this could cause the instantaneous extinction of the population due to their low resources as it is, the same applies for the other reasons listed below. Escalating prices, this could happen because of how scarce well-harvested food will be to obtain. Mass starvation, another effect that could occur due to the lessen population of animals and food production as well as damaged goods. The disintegration of the polar ice sheets, this would affect us horribly because it would raise sea levels, even more, bringing us to tsunami leading to a state of emergency and immediate evacuation of citizens in major cities especially islands which will have no chance to escape. Unbreathable air, we need oxygen to survive but the reality is the concentration of CO2 is the obstacle. High levels of it can kill us. People die because of wildlife smoke, fossil-fuel smoke, and pollution as a whole. This issue could potentially be shortening our lives. As the planet gets warmer, the more ozone that form (Wallace D., 2017, p.70). Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Many ask, what does climate change have to do with the extinction of humanity? A huge factor is an air being polluted. As I previously stated, there are traces of fossil fuel smoke, wildlife smoke, and carbon dioxide in our environment that has killed 10,000 or more in just one year and that’s only the beginning. As global temperature rise, this causes our resources to become questionable and eventually limited which will cause a constraint towards our survival.

Science has existed for over hundreds of years and that evolution has brought processes such as fossil fuels burning of coal and oil. All of these factors bring change in the world’s temperature. The process of climate change usually occurs from a list of things as noted, most being from humans. All this including global warming which is when land warms up which causes higher levels of emissions such as greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are gases that retain heat in the air. These gases can be water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. (Frumkin et, 2008). There are over a dozen diseases that are spreading because of this matter. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Now, the best way to avoid the increased issue would be prevention. Clinics can help towards immunizations, helping people stop smoking, find smoking alternatives, and use helmets on motorcycles or bicycles. Another way for prevention is to control the advancements of diseases by hypertension screening, cancer, and hyperlipidemia. Some of the following equivalences to help would correspond to mitigation or adaptation and slow or stabilize climate change through cutting on energy and keeping in mind safe choices.

Climate change affects infectious diseases through a host or transmission. Reducing your carbon footprint may not seem that important. An article from Huffington Post stated that a report was put online on the Lancet page. These couple of years we have noticed an obvious change in the temperature but not really the consequences of it. The pattern followed the growth of diseases as well. The hotter it gets outside the more insects remain around since that’s their preferred environment and they help spread air-borne diseases. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

In many South American countries, there is this mosquito that spreads Dengue which is a virus that comes with symptoms such as fever, vomiting, rashes and worse things like death in children. This virus has spread more and easier than before because of the conditions. In the world, it has increased to 11.1 percent since the 50s. Another common virus at one time was the Nile virus and transmitted also by mosquitos.

Find out how NursingAnswers.net can help you!
Our nursing and healthcare experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have, from simple essay plans, through to full nursing dissertations.

Now many other diseases such as kidney stones happen because of warmer climates. After a hot day walking around, it’s normal that your body will need water. Once your body goes into the process of dehydration then kidney stones can happen. According to the health records at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, it is thought that the temperature contributed to the kidney stones since over 60,000 weather archives were noted to coincide (Kopman J, Hauser A, 2014). The whole pattern that is going on evidently proves that as the climate is changing so are the kidney stone and many other health reports. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Many people know about malaria. The epidemic grew as much as the rate of dengue at one point. Even though these cases were reported in Africa, it’s safe to conclude most of the diseases like dengue are vector-borne and once again easier to transmit. Water-borne diseases like cholera occur often in third-world countries due to dirty water.

According to American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, around 50 million people have some sort of allergies (American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, n.a.) Allergies are more serious than people think. They are 6th in the list of most long-lasting viruses. It has been stated that even death can be possible due to how the body can react. Plant pollen is a factor that is becoming worse because of the change in the climate (Kaufman A, 2017). Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay Another situation is indoor mold which grows as a threat because mold is formed in humid or warmer weather. The pollen season is lasting longer since it’s a condition that thrives in warmer climates. Allergies in the spring season are the worst and they lost longer the warmer it is as well (Kaufman A., 2017). If the climate keeps on getting warmer bigger problems can arise.

ORDER   HERE NOW

Medicine has been created to prevent the problem (Frumkin, McMichael. 2008). Not many health professionals are responding. Not enough people are afraid or aware and that’s the main concern. Raising awareness in any situation is imperative. In unity there is power. Having all hands on deck on this subject will make the biggest transformation. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Droughts and floods are becoming so common now. This causes lost in harvest and leads to scarcity of basic resources such as food. When people don’t get the enough nutrients or water then can die. As more people get sick, the more difficult it becomes to find people in small villages that are still in decent conditions to work. Those who live near a river in villages start getting sick as well due to the flooding. Sadly, many health centers don’t have enough medical knowledge to treat the mass of people.

According to The Guardian, the same company “Lancet” published a report on the research coming to a conclusion that about 500,000 people will die a year by 2050 since the populations are not healthy as of now. As the rate of death and diseases keep increasing due to heart attacks, heat strokes, food poisoning, malaria, and many other diseases, no one is taking action (McMichael, Woodruff, Hales, 2006). A solution to cholera is to not expose yourself to soiled water until its purified. Food poisoning is easy to get unless you refrigerate and cook your food correctly. Getting medicine on time to treat malaria and another condition is imperative. Antimalarial medicine can reduce and prevent spreading malaria to nearby bigger cities. It’s easy to tackle these problems locally first (Derbyshire, 2006). Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Human health has always been influenced by climate and weather. Changes in climate and climate variability, particularly changes in weather extremes, affect the environment that provides us with clean air, food, water, shelter, and security. Climate change, together with other natural and human-made health stressors, threatens human health and well-being in numerous ways. Some of these health impacts are already being experienced in the United States.

Given that the impacts of climate change are projected to increase over the next century, certain existing health threats will intensify and new health threats may emerge. Connecting our understanding of how climate is changing with an understanding of how those changes may affect human health can inform decisions about mitigating (reducing) the amount of future climate change, suggest priorities for protecting public health, and help identify research needs. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

1.1 Our Changing Climate
Observed Climate Change
The fact that the Earth has warmed over the last century is unequivocal. Multiple observations of air and ocean temperatures, sea level, and snow and ice have shown these changes to be unprecedented over decades to millennia. Human influence has been the dominant cause of this observed warming. The 2014 U.S. National Climate Assessment (2014 NCA) found that rising temperatures, the resulting increases in the frequency or intensity of some extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and melting snow and ice are already disrupting people’s lives and damaging some sectors of the U.S. economy.

The concepts of climate and weather are often confused. Weather is the state of the atmosphere at any given time and place. Weather patterns vary greatly from year to year and from region to region. Familiar aspects of weather include temperature, precipitation, clouds, and wind that people experience throughout the course of a day. Severe weather conditions include hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and droughts. Climate is the average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades or longer. While the weather can change in minutes or hours, identifying a change in climate has required observations over a time period of decades to centuries or longer. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature as well as shifts in precipitation, changing risks of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Humans have known that climatic conditions affect epidemic diseases from long before the role of infectious agents was discovered, late in the nineteenth century. Roman aristocrats retreated to hill resorts each summer to avoid malaria. South Asians learnt early that, in high summer, strongly curried foods were less likely to cause diarrhoea.

Infectious agents vary greatly in size, type and mode of transmission. There are viruses, bacteria, protozoa and multicellular parasites. Those microbes that cause “anthroponoses” have adapted, via evolution, to the human species as their primary, usually exclusive, host. In contrast, non-human species are the natural reservoir for those infectious agents that cause “zoonoses” (Fig 6.1). There are directly transmitted anthroponoses (such as TB, HIV/AIDS, and measles) and zoonoses (e.g., rabies). There are also indirectly-transmitted, vector-borne, anthroponoses (e.g., malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever) and zoonoses (e.g. bubonic plague and Lyme disease). Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

fig 6.1 transmission cycles for infectious diseases
Vector-borne and water-borne diseases
Important determinants of vectorborne disease transmission include: (i) vector survival and reproduction, (ii) the vector’s biting rate, and (iii) the pathogen’s incubation rate within the vector organism. Vectors, pathogens and hosts each survive and reproduce within a range of optimal climatic conditions: temperature and precipitation are the most important, while sea level elevation, wind, and daylight duration are also important.

Human exposure to waterborne infections occurs by contact with contaminated drinking water, recreational water, or food. This may result from human actions, such as improper disposal of sewage wastes, or be due to weather events. Rainfall can influence the transport and dissemination of infectious agents, while temperature affects their growth and survival.

Observed and predicted climate/infectious disease links
There are three categories of research into the linkages between climatic conditions and infectious disease transmission. The first examines evidence from the recent past of associations between climate variability and infectious disease occurrence. The second looks at early indicators of already-emerging infectious disease impacts of long-term climate change. The third uses the above evidence to create predictive models to estimate the future burden of infectious disease under projected climate change scenarios. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Historical Evidence
There is much evidence of associations between climatic conditions and infectious diseases. Malaria is of great public health concern, and seems likely to be the vector-borne disease most sensitive to long-term climate change. Malaria varies seasonally in highly endemic areas. The link between malaria and extreme climatic events has long been studied in India, for example. Early last century, the river-irrigated Punjab region experienced periodic malaria epidemics. Excessive monsoon rainfall and high humidity was identified early on as a major influence, enhancing mosquito breeding and survival. Recent analyses have shown that the malaria epidemic risk increases around five-fold in the year after an El Niño event (2).

Early impacts of climate change
These include several infectious diseases, health impacts of temperature extremes and impacts of extreme climatic and weather events (described in chapter 5). Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Predictive Modeling
The main types of models used to forecast future climatic influences on infectious diseases include statistical, process-based, and landscape-based models (3). These three types of model address somewhat different questions.

Statistical models require, first, the derivation of a statistical (empirical) relationship between the current geographic distribution of the disease and the current location-specific climatic conditions. This describes the climatic influence on the actual distribution of the disease, given prevailing levels of human intervention (disease control, environmental management, etc.). By then applying this statistical equation to future climate scenarios, the actual distribution of the disease in future is estimated, assuming unchanged levels of human intervention within any particular climatic zone. These models have been applied to climate change impacts on malaria, dengue fever and, within the USA, encephalitis. For malaria some models have shown net increases in malaria over the coming halfcentury, and others little change. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Process-based (mathematical) models use equations that express the scientifically documented relationship between climatic variables and biological parameters – e.g., vector breeding, survival, and biting rates, and parasite incubation rates. In their simplest form, such models express, via a set of equations, how a given configuration of climate variables would affect vector and parasite biology and, therefore, disease transmission. Such models address the question: “If climatic conditions alone change, how would this change the potential transmission of the disease?” Using more complex “horizontal integration”, the conditioning effects of human interventions and social contexts can also be incorporated. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

This modelling method has been used particularly for malaria and dengue fever (4). The malaria modelling shows that small temperature increases can greatly affect transmission potential. Globally, temperature increases of 2-3ºC would increase the number of people who, in climatic terms, are at risk of malaria by around 3- 5%, i.e. several hundred million. Further, the seasonal duration of malaria would increase in many currently endemic areas. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Since climate also acts by influencing habitats, landscape-based modeling is also useful. This entails combining the climate-based models described above with the rapidly-developing use of spatial analytical methods, to study the effects of both climatic and other environmental factors (e.g. different vegetation types – often measured, in the model development stage, by ground-based or remote sensors). This type of modelling has been applied to estimate how future climate-induced changes in ground cover and surface water in Africa would affect mosquitoes and tsetse flies and, hence, malaria and African sleeping sickness. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay

Conclusion
Changes in infectious disease transmission patterns are a likely major consequence of climate change. We need to learn more about the underlying complex causal relationships, and apply this information to the prediction of future impacts, using more complete, better validated, integrated, models. Public Health Issues on The Climate Change Essay