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    • Report raises alarm over deadly health effects of climate change
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    Report raises alarm over deadly health effects of climate change

    Sakege Posted on

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    Climate change is killing Americans in surprising ways and the waste created by healthcare itself is part of the problem, says a report published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.

    The report, published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet, is part of a global study looking at how climate change is affecting global health.

    Climate change has created a health crisis that continues to worsen and threatens to undermine the last 50 years of advances in public health, it says.

    The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report has been published every year since 2016. This year’s report calls on the world’s nations, and the United States, to rapidly reduce the amounts of fossil fuels burned while increasing the transition to clean energy.

    The health harms created by climate change are “on the same order of magnitude as the harms associated with medical errors,” said Jonathan Buonocore, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health. and one of the authors of the article.

    (Preventable medical errors kill 250,000 Americans each yearaccording to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine).

    Climate change affects the health of Americans in multiple ways. The report cites fossil fuel-related air pollutiontropical cyclones worsened by climate change, Links between heat waves and premature births and the future effects of climate change.

    On the positive side, the adoption of wind and solar energy in the United States has generated between 1,200 and 1,600 Fewer premature deaths in the US in 2022 due to better air quality..

    Healthcare waste is part of the problem, researchers say

    The report highlights the healthcare sector’s connection to climate change, as 8.5% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from this industry. The researchers point out that there is no national program that requires you to measure, manage or disclose your data.

    The figure includes not only the energy used by hospitals and clinics, but also the huge amounts of medical waste, often single-use plastic devices, that are discarded every day, Buonocore said.

    All that disposable plastic is designed to help keep hospitals and operating rooms sterile, but researchers say there are ways to reduce waste without endangering patients.

    Heating and cooling costs are also an issue. HVAC systems in operating rooms run 24/7 whether or not there is a patient in them, said Dr. Shaneeta Johnson, professor of surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Operating rooms generate a lot of waste

    Operating rooms contribute to this in ways patients may not think about, Johnson said.

    “The operating room is responsible for approximately 30% of medical waste in the United States,” he said. That includes disposable instruments, plastic cloths, syringes, tubes, bandages and anything that could be contaminated with body fluids. He Disposal of medical waste is regulated. and in many cases it must be incinerated.

    One thing hospitals have been working on is creating what is known as “lean” surgical trays, meaning only sterilizing and placing on surgical trays the instruments that the surgeon is most likely to need, rather than all the possible ones. that you want. This is achieved by working with surgeons so that they can select the instruments they actually use and omit those that are not necessary.

    “There are significant opportunities to ’tilt’ surgical trays so that we are not autoclaving as many instruments,” Johnson said. Studies show that such efforts can reduce a medical institution’s carbon footprint.

    An autoclave is a machine that exposes surgical supplies to hot steam under pressure to sterilize them.

    “We have to work harder to reduce waste. Both the physical waste and also the resources wasted by overdiagnosis and overtreatment. All of this would save the country a lot of money and dramatically reduce our industry’s carbon footprint,” said Dr. Vivian Lee, author of the book, “The long term solution“, and executive fellow at Harvard Business School, Who has written on the subject?.

    He points out that for every patient in a hospital, more 30 pounds of waste is produced per day in the US, primarily due to the rise of disposables. Some waste is due to procedures that are essentially useless. “Many professional societies have drawn up long lists of unnecessary treatments, such as antibiotics for the common cold or x-rays for back pain. All of these wasted resources create an excessive carbon footprint and very rarely help patients,” Lee said.

    Sakege
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