Experts predict that climate change, in addition to causing longer and fiercer heat waves and higher humidity, will bring an increase in viruses and bacteria that cause illness.
Infectious disease specialists who will have to deal with those health effects got an unplanned preview from the deadly H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009-2010 and the whooping cough epidemic that followed a few months later.
For Dr. Kalvin Yu, Southern California’s regional chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser-Permanente, the fallout of the outbreaks – emergency room lines, bed shortages and the need for data analysis to track trends – was a glimpse into how the future might be under the shadow of global warming. Increased heat and humidity expected in the Inland region could set the stage for more disease outbreaks.
“With things like this you can expect the emergency room and urgent care visit rates to increase,” said Yu, who helped form Kaiser’s emergency command center for the flu and whooping cough outbreaks. “In terms of increased heat, it has quite significant infectious disease ramifications.”
Health is a huge component of climate change, but public safety is also a significant part of planning by local agencies, including fire departments and water providers.
A recent state report, “Our Changing Climate 2012,” warned about what climate change is expected to bring: more pronounced heat waves and wildfires, a drop in water quality, higher energy costs, food shortages and more infectious diseases, especially in minority and low-income communities and among people with compromised immune systems.
It hasn’t been hard to imagine the heat waves. With an average temperature of 77.6 degrees, July was the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. The previous record of 77.4 degrees was from the Dust Bowl of 1936, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This July’s temperature was 3.3 degrees warmer than the 20th century average in the continental United States.
Earlier this month, well-known climate scientist James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said new research connects three recent heat waves to global warming: last year’s devastating Texas-Oklahoma drought; the 2010 heat waves in Russia and the Middle East that killed thousands of people; and the 2003 European heat wave blamed for tens of thousands of deaths.
Under climate change, life is sure to change for Inland residents, said Robert Allen, an assistant professor of climatology at UC Riverside.
“With an increase in these heat waves, that’s not going to be very pleasant, it’s going to limit outdoor activity, possibly be life-threatening to older people, people who don’t have access to air conditioning. It’s going to make things more uncomfortable,” he said. “Climate change is also associated with an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, and that’s going to inhibit your body’s ability to cool itself.”
BUILDING ON EXPERIENCE
Dr. Yu is ready.
The command center team concept used for the flu and whooping cough outbreaks is part of the network’s doomsday scenario. Aside from health care providers, the team includes support staff for such issues as accommodating an overflow of patients in other Kaiser hospitals and keeping enough respirator masks in stock, he said.
Yu expects to see a similar approach for dealing with the worst effects of a changing environment, including outbreaks of viral and bacterial illnesses. Depending on what the changes are, and no one knows for sure what they will be, Southern California may see more cases of malaria and dengue fever if heat and humidity increase, he said.
“Hospitals need to be tracking their infections and … set their baseline for the possibility that climate change does increase the prevalence of certain infections,” Yu said. “If you know the baseline and see an uptick, you’re already getting a warning of something happening. You need to be able to act overnight.”
Increased use of air conditioners and cooling units, where condensation forms and dirt collects, can lead to Legionnaires’ disease and pneumonia, particularly for those with compromised immune systems, the elderly and the very young, he said. With increased fires, soil could dry and become airborne, carrying with it the fungus spores of valley fever, which causes fatigue and coughing and can lead to a fatal infection. Minorities are more susceptible to valley fever.
“We are tracking these infections with electronic medical records and tracking antibiotic use so we don’t breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” Yu said. “A lot of this takes a lot of forward thinking and prevention.”
Asthma and cardiac issues also could result from pollution caused by an increase in wildfires, experts said.
The state’s fire department already has seen an increase in deadly, destructive blazes attributed to climate change, said Janet Upton, a spokeswoman for Cal Fire.
The agency has been tracking statistics in California’s largest fires since the late 1920s and found that the biggest ones were occurring at a rate of just over one per decade, until 2002. “Then it was bam, 11 of these large fires in rapid succession,” Upton said. Half of the state’s 20 largest fires have occurred in the past decade.
California’s fire season is now two months longer then it used to be and, in Southern California, it’s year-round.
Climate change has brought drought, which stressed trees and made them susceptible to pests and disease. They have been dying off and becoming tinder for fires.
But climate change isn’t just about warming. It’s also about weather extremes. In 2008, a lightning siege near Monterey delivered 8,000 strikes and triggered 2,000 simultaneous fires, Upton said. “That was unprecedented. We had not seen that in over four decades long of recollections and records, not to that magnitude or duration.”
Those “siege” events, characterized by many large, damaging fires, used to be something firefighters saw maybe once in their career.
“My generation is seeing a dozen, 15 siege fires in our careers,” said Upton, who joined the department in the mid-1980s. Siege events occurred in 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2008, she said.
The threat of climate change has forced Cal Fire to get aggressive, focusing on keeping up its successful initial attack rate. Experts measure weather conditions twice a day and can predict extreme weather conditions 48 hours ahead, and that is used to dictate staffing and response, Upton said.
Cal Fire also relies on mutual-aid agreements with other departments statewide and relies on individuals to cut back brush and create defensible space around their homes.
“It’s a struggle to get people to pay attention,” she said. “We’ve gotten aggressive in getting the public to buy in, to acknowledge that living in California comes with a responsibility to recognize we are prone to a myriad of disasters. It’s incumbent on individuals to prepare their homes and families.”
Follow Janet Zimmerman on Twitter: @JanetLZimmerman