Global warming impacts health   (Page 1 of 3)

Climate change threatens to trigger a widespread and devastating health crisis in Canada. Why are medical professionals and policy-makers slow off the mark?

By Alex Roslin with photography by Patrice Halley

Monday, July 5, 2010, was the kind of sticky, pavementshimmering Montréal day that only kids at a water park could appreciate. And that is just where 14-year-old Mathieu Thibodeau-Ross found himself, heading for the whitewater rafting ride at the Mont Saint-Sauveur Water Park, 75 kilometres northwest of Montréal.

A map of ground temperature in Montréal on a July day.

The humidex was approaching 40°C a little after 11 a.m. when Mathieu started up the stairs to access the ride. He never made it to the top. Witnesses would later report that the teen started to wheeze and then collapsed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital, a victim of cardiac arrest.

It will likely take several months for the Quebec coroner’s office to determine what role the high heat and humidity may have played in Mathieu’s fate. But it is already clear that the number of deaths spiked to unusually high levels during the hot spell which began on that blazing July day. By Thursday, Environment Canada was calling it the most intense heat wave on record in Montréal. With thick smog blanketing the city all week, 80 people died in Montréal from various causes on that Thursday alone — double the typical daily total.

Pierre Gosselin watched the growing tide of calamities and felt perversely relieved. “At least we didn’t see the same problems as in Paris in 2003,” says Gosselin, professor of medicine at Université Laval and coordinator of climatechange science at the Quebec Public Health Institute. A torrid heat wave had struck Europe that year, claiming an estimated 70,000 lives, including 4,866 in Paris — the worst-hit city. The catastrophe started Gosselin on a sevenyear quest to prepare Quebec for the mounting tide of health-related catastrophes arising from heat waves, floods and other extreme climatic events expected with global warming. “What we’ve seen this summer,” he says, “is an example of what we will see more and more.”

After the Paris disaster, Quebec appointed Gosselin, 56, to head a $30 million program to detect and prepare for weather gone wild. As luck would have it, the first component of that program, a climate-change war room known as the Extreme Heat Wave Portal, came online on June 1 of this year, just in time for Montréal’s worst-ever heat wave.

On Monday, July 5, the new system saw action for the first time. That morning, a sweating Gosselin was working from his century-old duplex in Québec’s Montcalm District, wondering whether he should install an air conditioner. At 11:24 a.m., almost at the moment Mathieu Thibodeau- Ross collapsed at Mont Saint-Sauveur, Gosselin received an automated e-mail alert declaring a heat wave emergency in Montréal and across southern Quebec.

The alert, sent out by the Extreme Heat Wave Portal to public health and emergency officials across Quebec, was generated by software developed by Gosselin’s team. It compiles real-time data on air pollution, emergency room visits, calls to the province’s Info-Santé health hotline, ambulance traffic and weather forecasts, all mapped onto Google Earth.

Gosselin quickly called his colleagues at the Quebec Public Health Institute. “Are you sure there’s no mistake?” he asked. “Is everything connected properly?” The system was working fine. Calls started to pour in from health ministry and public health officials, who had all received the same alert. “It’s for real,” Gosselin told them.

The alert prompted the City of Montréal to set in motion its new “heat plan.” The city issued public alerts advising Montrealers to stay out of the sun and guzzle plenty of water. Police and firefighters went door to door to check on the elderly and vulnerable people, and hours were extended at public swimming pools and air-conditioned municipal buildings to give overwhelmed residents somewhere to cool off.

Climate-change experts say the episode is a taste of what is to come thanks to global warming. But despite Gosselin’s efforts, it seems the medical community and government policy-makers are behind the curve in preparing for the looming health crisis triggered by a warming planet.

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet caused a stir in 2009 when it concluded that “climate change could be the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

Gosselin would agree with that assessment. According to his calculations, by 2050 or 2060, global warming is likely to surpass car accidents as a cause of death of Quebecers. That was one of the conclusions of a landmark Health Canada study on climate change that Gosselin co-authored in 2008. “The hotter it is, the more deaths,” says Gosselin. “And it increases exponentially. It’s something quite big that’s coming.”