African Climes

Health is impacted by climate change in various ways because the wellbeing of people depends on the environment which in turn is affected by climate change. Everything required to sustain life is provided for by a habitable environment. Oxygen, freshwater, soil on which plants grow, and even the building blocks of urbanization, all that is derived from nature. But in terms of climate change, health is influenced primarily through the very important lens of water. Statistics put 80% of the world facing water insecurity in one way or another. They don’t have a safe and reliable source of enough freshwater for all their needs. Climate change will cause water scarcity through droughts and heatwaves but also floods and inundation because of too much rain, cyclones or sea level rise. Young African Medics. Image by Tyck/Iwaria To begin with, lack of enough drinking water causes dehydration and eventually death of people in times of strong drought or heatwaves. Agriculture is controlled ...

 Climate change affects human health in various and many ways, some of which I look at below.   Climate change and diseases  Climate change causes erratic and unpredictable weather patterns. Some places become colder, others wetter, others drier, mostly outside the normal times. In terms of human health, weather patterns will affect the life cycles of pathogens and population, breeding patterns and abundance of vectors. a doctor and a patient - courtesy of dhmri A vector is an organism which provides habitation for, while not being directly affected by a pathogen. Let’s take a tropical disease like Malaria. Malaria is caused by protozoa known as plasmodium. Plasmodium uses mosquitoes as a vector. When an infected mosquito bites a person, it passes along plasmodium into that person’s bloodstream. Mosquitoes also pass along several other diseases alongside malaria, such as yellow fever, elephantiasis, rift valley fever and of course, Zika. A female a...