Nearly Half A Million U.S. Doctors Warn That Climate Change Is Making Us Sick

One morning in July 2011, Samantha Ahdoot’s 9-year-old son, Isaac, grabbed his clarinet, trekked up the hilly road to the bus stop and set off for another day at the band camp near his home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Within an hour, Ahdoot’s phone rang: Isaac had collapsed and was en route to the emergency room on a stretcher. Her otherwise healthy son suffered heat exhaustion and dehydration from the blistering heat of a summer that regularly broke temperature records. July alone shattered two daytime high temperature records in just the D.C. area. Concerned, Ahdoot, a pediatrician, volunteered to be camp physician. As temperatures soared, she was forced to cut soccer games short and limit campers to swimming and indoor activities. “That was the experience that first got me thinking about how our summers are getting hotter and what does that mean for children, their health and their safety,” Ahdoot, a doctor at Pediatric Associates of Alexandria, told The Huffington Post by phone on Tuesday. “Climate change isn’t about our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, just as it’s not about polar bears and penguins. Climate change is about people and their health today in 2017.” On Wednesday, Ahdoot joined more than 434,000 physicians ― more than half the doctors in the U.S. ― in a newly formed medical consortium warning the public about the effects climate change is already having on health. The Consortium on Climate...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news