Public health has improved over the past few decades in almost every country on Earth, thanks largely to better access to antibiotics, vaccines, and other interventions that keep diseases at bay. Well-being, life expectancy, maternal health, and other metrics of progress have gotten better. So why is the World Health Organization warning that humanity is on the precipice of a health crisis?
The answer is that our public health innovations are predicated on the assumption that our environment will continue to function largely as it has since the end of the last Ice Age. But this fails to account for a century-plus of rampant fossil fuel use.
I’m Zoya Teirstein, senior staff writer at Grist, where we recently launched an ambitious new series called “Vital Signs.” Over the next seven months, we'll take readers around the world to explore how climate change is threatening human health in ways that transcend borders.
These changes, building slowly for decades, have only begun to spill into plain view: record outbreaks of dengue fever in Latin America last year, widespread drought-driven malnutrition in the Horn of Africa, wildfire smoke and impaired cognitive development in Australia, deadly waterborne bacteria moving up our own Atlantic Coast. We have tools to tackle these problems. The question is: Will humanity acknowledge the baseline shift in time to deploy them?
For our first story, I shadowed an Arizona doctor trying to vanquish valley fever, a deadly fungal disease that climate change is making dramatically more prevalent. Decades of research in Phoenix and Tucson, the epicenter of the illness, may soon bear fruit—if the efforts survive the Trump administration's assault on science.
Next, freelancer Georgia Gee traveled to Kenya to meet villagers affected by kala-azar, a “black fever” caused by sandflies—left untreated, it kills nearly everyone it infects. Dramatic swings between severe droughts and flash floods have supercharged the breeding of infected sandflies. Kenya aspired to eliminate the disease by 2030—that is, until the Trump administration killed USAID, which was funding activities critical to stopping its spread.
As “Vital Signs” rolls out, we’ll bring you additional stories from places like Australia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and here at home. You can sign up to receive alerts when new stories become available. Thanks for reading!
—Zoya Teirstein
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