Health Wanted: Extreme Heat—It’s Getting Hot in Here
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: Climate change is bringing the heat, and, along with it, volatile weather events and health hazards. On this week’s episode of Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow hones in on the ways climate change and heat affect our lives. Her guest, Noah Scovronick, PhD, offers his perspective regarding climate research and ways to move toward a cooler world.
The takeaway:
- This summer has been setting record-level heat, with June being the 13th month in a row where the monthly average temperature was the highest it’s been since the start of record keeping in 1850.
- The greenhouse effect is a process where heat gets trapped near Earth’s surface by certain gasses such as methane and carbon dioxide. This is a big cause of climate change, and humans have been adding more of these gasses for centuries.
- Extreme heat is dangerous! Our bodies can only do so much to keep cool, and heat makes it harder to stay hydrated and regulate important systems of the body involving kidney and heart function.
- Heat is only predicted to get worse since global warming is occurring faster than scientists and policy-makers had originally anticipated.
- Large-scale policy change and technological advances could still help us avoid some aspects of climate change.
The Interview
The guest: Noah Scovronick, PhD
The key takeaways:
- Heat-related illnesses extend beyond just heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and others that occur when our core body temperature increases. Heat can also increase the risk of other diseases that affect the heart, lungs, or even mental health. This can happen even when there is not a heat wave or heat advisory, because it depends on exposure.
- We can make a more immediate impact on climate change by focusing on reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses like methane, which is shorter-lived in the atmosphere, rather than only carbon monoxide, which persists in the atmosphere for a century or more.
- Climate policy can have a huge impact on human health, because policies that target emissions often also improve air quality by reducing pollution.
- Policy action is needed to combat climate change, but personal behaviors like eating less red meat or biking to work can also make an impact. Every bit of emissions that is not released into the atmosphere matters!
The Listener Questions
How do I know if I am up to date on my COVID vaccine?
There are not new vaccines yet for this year. If Bristow had to estimate, she’d say they’ll be ready by the first week of September.
This is because in June, at the independent advisory committee meeting for the FDA, Moderna and NovaVax both said they’d be ready to ship in mid-August, and Pfizer said they’d be ready to ship “as soon as the vaccine was approved.” Bristow said she assumes the vaccines will be ready in mid-August, and the FDA will review and hopefully approve them by the first week of September.
The good news is that the advisory committee for the CDC that decides who should get the updated vaccines already voted in June that they should be made available to everyone over 6 months of age. So, once the FDA approves the vaccines, they can go straight to the public and we don’t have to wait for another committee meeting to approve them.
Olympic surfers are staying on a cruise ship. Do cruise ships put you at risk for getting sick?
France does not have ideal surf in the summer, so the surfing competition is being held in Tahiti, and the surfers are staying on a 103-cabin cruise ship. In this case, Bristow says she thinks the cruise ship is safer, health-wise, than the regular Olympic Village.
There are only 48 athletes, and they each get their own private rooms. It’s also in a remote island and there aren’t millions of spectators coming to watch them. They could, of course, still have an outbreak of a gastrointestinal illness like norovirus, COVID, or sexually transmitted infections depending on how they celebrate, but we wouldn’t hear about those right away, if ever.
But there are so few of them, they’re like a little bubble out there. Bristow says she is more concerned about people in Paris. Athletes in Paris have already seen some COVID cases, and with so many visitors coming from overseas there’s a higher potential for outbreaks of things like measles or dengue.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
- Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
- Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
- Watching on WABE's YouTube channel
Find full show notes and sources here.
