A survey of African American physicians on the health effects of climate change.

Mona Sarfaty,Mark Mitchell,Brittany Bloodhart,Edward Maibach

doi:10.3390/ijerph111212473

Abstract

The U.S. National Climate Assessment concluded that climate change is harming the health of many Americans and identified people in some communities of color as particularly vulnerable to these effects. In Spring 2014, we surveyed members of the National Medical Association, a society of African American physicians who care for a disproportionate number of African American patients, to determine whether they were seeing the health effects of climate change in their practices; the response rate was 30% (n = 284). Over 86% of respondents indicated that climate change was relevant to direct patient care, and 61% that their own patients were already being harmed by climate change moderately or a great deal. The most commonly reported health effects were injuries from severe storms, floods, and wildfires (88%), increases in severity of chronic disease due to air pollution (88%), and allergic symptoms from prolonged exposure to plants or mold (80%). The majority of survey respondents support medical training, patient and public education regarding the impact of climate change on health, and advocacy by their professional society; nearly all respondents indicated that the US should invest in significant efforts to protect people from the health effects of climate change (88%), and to reduce the potential impacts of climate change (93%). These findings suggest that African American physicians are currently seeing the health impacts of climate change among their patients, and that they support a range of responses by the medical profession, and public policy makers, to prevent further harm.

Highlights

The Third National Climate Assessment: Climate Change Impacts in the United States (NCA3) [1], published in May 2014, reported that health effects of global climate change are already evident in the United States
The NCA3 and IPCC AR5 reports—which were both based on a substantial number of peer-reviewed studies—offer clarity and consistency about health problems caused or worsened by climate change and raise an obvious and pressing question: Are the health problems associated with climate change being witnessed by practitioners of clinical medicine? If these problems are identifiable to researchers, it is reasonable to assume that practitioners would be seeing them
There is a near consensus among African American physicians in the National Medical Association that climate change is occurring, and that its impacts are relevant to direct patient care

Summary

Introduction

The Third National Climate Assessment: Climate Change Impacts in the United States (NCA3) [1], published in May 2014, reported that health effects of global climate change are already evident in the United States. The Fifth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR 5), released a few months earlier in 2014, reached similar conclusions about the health impacts of climate change around the world [2]. If these problems are identifiable to researchers, it is reasonable to assume that practitioners would be seeing them. To answer this question, we surveyed members of a U.S medical society to determine if a group of physicians in a likely position to witness the health effects from climate change were witnessing them in their practices, and to assess what actions, if any, they feel the medical community should be taking to address the problems

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