How Climate Change Threatens Public Health and What We Must Do About It
Paul Epstein, M.D., Associate Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School, and Dan Ferber
As Rachel Carson did in her classic, Silent Spring, Dr. Paul Epstein delivers a powerful wake-up call to readers and leaders, chronicling the alarming effects of global climate change on the health of the planet and all its inhabitants. Blending groundbreaking scientific inquiry, sympathetic human stories, and a behind-the-scenes view of the politics of climate change during the Bush administration, Dr. Epstein―originally a general practitioner and tropical disease specialist―and award-winning science journalist Dan Ferber unveil an elegant and far-reaching synthesis of earth science and medical research that sheds a new light on the growing climate crisis and its startling impact on human health.
From the highlands of Africa, where mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever now appear at high altitudes, to the outpatient unit of Harlem Hospital, where doctors treat children with asthma worsened by high pollen levels boosted by rising carbon dioxide and longer growing seasons, Epstein and Ferber sound a clarion call that introduces readers to the cutting edge of climate-change science. Their book, the first to examine global warming’s damaging health effects, also contains an array of innovative measures to ameliorate their causes.
Designed to set the agenda for public officials, influence business policies, and rally public awareness, Changing Planet, Changing Health boldly argues that we must heal the Earth, and identifies measures that will enable us to heal ourselves as well.