By Bartolomeo Buscema
Healthcare in Europe is provided through a wide range of different systems run at individual national levels. There is a need to harmonize all national systems in order to achieve best practices together with economical results. In this scenery, about six hundred of European health policy experts , member of civil society, academia and business from across Europe met at the annual 2019 European Health Forum Gastein (2-4 October 2019, Austria) explored disruptive proposals to enhance health level based mainly on artificial intelligence, economy strategies concerning well-being and to combat climate change to limit its effect on citizens.
Many topics have been deal with, among them: data for safer care ( digital solutions and surveillance systems for patient safety),toward economy of well-being, vaccine ecosystem health check, obesity and cancer guidelines in Europe. Besides, ministers and high-level representatives from EU Member States, experts of the European Commission joined the discussions outlining their near term visions for the future of health. Other topics were the power of digital technologies, developing effective vaccines campaigns to decrease vaccine hesitancy and harmful effects of climate change on health. In this article , we focus on the latter topic underlining the undeniable effect on people’s health, which is rapidly becoming a public health emergency.
It is worthwhile to put in evidence that 4.7% of carbon emissions come from the health sector which is the 5th highest pollution emitter. The challenge to achieve “zero carbon emissions“ in Europe will require radical steps to be taken by hospitals, industry, healthcare professionals and patients. The effects of climate change on public health, affect all areas of life including mainly various impacts such as the increase risk of infectious diseases, allergies, harmful effects related to heat waves especially for old poorer people. These effects also the labour market as the annual total working hours decreased. European countries are in a privileged situation as the effects of climate change can still be managed by helping the more vulnerable persons. Other regions in the world, especially Africa, witness more dramatic changes affecting mostly poor people .We do believe that European Union should assume roles and responsibilities to help people also in the rest of the world displaying and wide spreading all the necessary best practice adaption measures against the disruptive effect of the rapid increment of global mean temperature.
In recent years our understanding of climate-health relationships has increased rapidly and consequently our understanding of how the disruption of biophysical and ecological systems due to climate change might affect the longer-term wellbeing and health of populations. It is worthwhile to underline that Climate change can affect human health directly (e.g., impacts of thermal stress, death/injury in floods and storms) and indirectly through changes in the ranges of disease vectors (e.g., mosquitoes), water-borne pathogens, water quality, air quality, and food availability and quality. For this scope, it is crucial to cut greenhouse emissions sufficiently to keep temperature increase below 1,5°C above pre-industrial level going toward to decarbonising the economy as a result of reduced air pollution. Solutions ,of course, must be implemented taking into account present knowledge and in this respect the scientific community should be played an important role in countering misinformation on the health effects of climate change and in wide spreading the best solutions adaptation and mitigation strategies. This should be done, in close collaboration with decision makers and politicians. Starting from the Paris Climate Agreement, which also is the most important public health agreement of this century, we need to decrease emissions from fossil fuel combustion and consequently reduce air pollution, which causes 600.000 deaths in European region every year. During the forum it has been stated that if member States would honor the commitments of the Paris Climate Agreement, we would prevent 180.000 yearly deaths in the region.
Photos: credit Bartolomeo Buscema
Bartolomeo Buscema is science journalist and science writer, UGIS, Italy
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