Category: Environment

Climate change is undermining people’s mental health – it’s time for action

Woman carrying child in flood water due to climate change
Image credit: Banjir Jakarta, World Meteorological Organization

I have spent the last 18 months encouraging effective international responses to COVID-19. I have learned that the coordinated and connected responses needed for responses to global threats are not easily achieved in today’s world. Yet unless nations can find ways to agree on the challenge, combine their responses and work willingly in synergy, success will be elusive.

Building the habit of working together is even more important when tackling climate change and its consequences. This particularly applies when exploring how changing climates affect people’s mental wellbeing.

There is indeed mounting evidence that climate change is affecting people’s minds as well as their bodies. The number who end their lives during extreme weather and climate events is on the increase. Following a climate-driven disaster, cases of psychological trauma can exceed those of physical injury by 40 to 1.

Yet the potent psychological effects of climate change are largely absent from the public and policy discourse. They need to be made tangible and accessible. This is even more important given the expected increase in the extent and severity of extreme weather all over the world.

The issue needs attention now because it has the potential to undermine the lives of millions of people. It needs professional bodies, universities, local authorities, governments and international organisations to act together now. If effective action is delayed, the scale of the challenge will increase sharply, as will the cost of action.

The Climate Cares team from Imperial’s Institute of Global Health Innovation and Grantham Institute has laid bare some of these issues in a major new review, released last week. The review sets out best how to support people whose mental wellbeing is undermined by changing climate. The proposed actions will enable them to live their lives to the full, enjoying good mental health. There is a clear appreciation of who needs to act, and how they should do so. Actions should be implemented with a view to their being adapted to local context and reviewed regularly.

Implementation can be challenging as those most at risk of climate-related mental ill-health often have limited power and agency and are hard to reach. Those who are at risk should be incorporated into any response. As health and social care systems adapt to their specific needs, they will make an even more important contribution to fair, healthy and happier futures for all.

Professor David Nabarro is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and WHO Special Envoy on COVID-19. 

Download the report, ‘The impact of climate change on mental health and emotional wellbeing: current evidence and implications for policy and practice’, by clicking this link. 

New asthma treatment candidate provides hope to millions

By IGHI guest blogger Chanice Henry, Pharma IQ

Researchers have uncovered a new drug candidate that could relieve millions of people who are under-served by current asthma treatments.  

Asthma is a relatively common disease that hinders the respiration of over 300 million individuals globally, leading to episodes of wheezing, chest tightness and other severe problems.

Limitations

Indeed inhalers and other medications exist to manage the disease. However, many of these manufactured treatments have critical side effects and fail to provide relief for around one-third of asthma suffers. Bronchodilator inhalers are used by the majority of asthma suffers and although effective in treating respiratory conditions there are still some gaps in understanding on how and why these inhalers work.

According to recent reports US prices for biologics that combat asthma are to be reviewed this year.

Read more: Biosimilars grow from strength to strength

New hope

After examining over 6,000 compounds, researchers from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Shanghai University in China have identified a new drug that relaxes the muscles and opens airways in egg and dust mite induced asthma sufferers.

Luis Ulloa, a lead author and immunologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School notes that the treatment could provide hope for asthma suffers without many options currently.

The study discovered that asthmatic lung tissue had lower levels of the protein metallothionein-2 (MT2). In fact, mice without this protein were twice as vulnerable to asthma. Treatment with MT2 improved breathing troubles.

The treatment the researchers developed from the M2-2 protein (TSG12) was found to relax airway muscle cells, widen pulmonary airways and lower pulmonary resistance.

The next stage for the candidate, which is not toxic to human cells and more successful in reducing pulmonary resistance than other FDA approved medications according to the medical school, is for it to enter clinical trials.

Luis Ulloa said: “We found that the TSG12 used in the study is both non-toxic and more effective in reducing pulmonary resistance and could be a promising therapeutic approach for treating asthma without losing their effectiveness overtime.”

Read more: Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Drug Discovery (more…)

Mosquitoes, human health and environmental change

By Paul Huxley, Research Postgraduate, Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health

MosquitoRonald Ross, a British medical doctor of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, was first to identify the mosquito as the winged-insect carrier of malaria-causing parasites. Prior to this breakthrough, bad air (mal aria in Italian) was thought to have been the culprit. Together, Ross and Giovanni Grassi (who’s work, unlike Ross’, was controversially ignored by the Nobel Committee in 1902) uncovered a truth of huge ecological and epidemiological significance and sparked an ongoing international research effort aimed at answering fundamental questions about the processes that drive patterns of human morbidity and mortality caused by diseases carried by mosquitoes.

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How can universal sanitation be achieved by 2030? A quick look at potential models to deliver

By Eve MacKinnon, PhD candidate at University College London

World Toilet Day

To mark World Toilet Day on Saturday 19 November, guest blogger Eve MacKinnon takes a look at the developing innovation in sanitation.

In 2015 Google held a technology festival in South Africa aiming to develop ways to digitify billions of people in the continent, who as yet unconnected are a significant potential new market for their products and therefore hugely valuable for future growth.

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COPD – son of a TB

By Andre F.S. Amaral, Research Associate, National Heart and Lung Institute

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterised by chronic airflow obstruction and is the third most common cause of death worldwide, especially in low and middle income countries (LMICs). The main risk factor for this disease is tobacco smoking. However, smoking is still uncommon in many LMICs and more than 20% of people with COPD do not have a history of smoking.

What could then be causing COPD among people who do not smoke?
Some have advocated that the high number of deaths by COPD among non-smokers, especially in LMICs, could easily be explained by a high exposure to smoke from burning biomass for cooking, heating and lighting. However, large studies have ailed to find an association of airflow obstruction with use of biomass.

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Others have suggested that infectious diseases, which are still common in LMICs, could have a role in COPD. Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of mortality due to respiratory infection worldwide, but with its death rate decreasing since 1990 several millions of people are saved every year. Broadly speaking there is considerable overlap between regions with high incidence of TB and high mortality from COPD, therefore it makes sense to improve our understanding of the relationship between these two diseases.

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World Toilet Day 2015: Making sanitation sustainable and safe

By Dr Michael Templeton, Reader in Public Health Engineering

toilet signToday, Thursday 19th November, is World Toilet Day. Sadly, it is estimated that 2.5 billion people around the world still lack access to an adequate toilet. Many others rely on only basic pit latrines which eventually fill up and can become unsanitary. Many countries failed to meet their Millennium Development Goal target for access to improved sanitation, and the recently stated Sustainable Development Goals continue to emphasise improving sanitation as a key objective towards global development.

Research at Imperial College London by the group of Dr Michael Templeton in the Environmental and Water Resource Engineering section of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is investigating ways to make sanitation more sustainable and safer.

The ‘Tiger Toilet’ is an innovative, low-cost toilet design that uses tiger worms to compost human waste within latrines, thereby reducing the fill rate of the latrine. Envisioned through a collaboration with colleagues at Bear Valley Ventures and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the goal was to create a toilet that will last for much longer than currently available latrine and septic tank designs before needing emptying. Side benefits are that the tiger worms produce a safe and easy-to-handle compost material and treat the liquid portion of the waste. After lab- and pilot-scale testing at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales to determine the optimum toilet design parameters, Tiger Toilets have been trialled by Bear Valley Ventures and local partners for use in communities around the world, and have recently been launched commercially in Maharashtra province, India in partnership with PriMove. Research is ongoing to understand the factors affecting the performance of the Tiger Toilet on-site and to assess the quantity and quality of compost material produced. (more…)

Making it pay by simple addition: win-win solutions for health and the environment

By Dr Kris Murray, Grantham Lecturer in Global Change Ecology

3D rendering of the Earth on a wheelchair

Our planet is ill. Ongoing loss and endangerment of species, degradation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems and their services, and man made changes to the global climate are dramatic symptoms of a major decline in the planet’s environmental health.

In glaring contrast, human health has improved, in some cases radically. Decreases in malnutrition, mortality due to infectious diseases and infant mortality rates, accompanied by substantial increases in life expectancy, can be observed in every major region of the world.

So why is health winning a war, while the environment is losing one?

At a fundamental level, there is a huge difference in investment. Human health is a global priority and survival, healthiness and well-being are personal objectives for almost everyone. Preservation of the environment simply isn’t. Spending on global health, for example, is at least an order of magnitude greater than for environmental conservation. (more…)

WaterAid UK / International World Toilet Day

Today 36 prominent international health and development experts including representatives from WaterAid, The World Medical Association, the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Amref Health Africa,  Bangladesh Medical Association, British Medical Association, Commonwealth Medical Association, Global Health Council, Indian Medical Association, International Confederation of Midwifes, Nigerian Medical Association, and the Royal College of General Practitioners amongst many others, have called for an end to a crisis that has claimed the lives of over 10 million children under the age of five since the year 2000.  

In an Open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, the signatories, representing over 620,000 health professionals globally, highlight the desperate waste of life caused by people not having access to a basic toilet. Without basic sanitation, children have no choice but to live and play in areas contaminated by human waste.

One in three children globally does not have access to a basic toilet, which alongside unsafe drinking water and a lack of hygiene services, contributes to the world’s three main killers of children: undernutrition, pneumonia and diarrhoea, the letter states.

The letter, coordinated by the international development organisation WaterAid, has been published to coincide with World Toilet Day. It is also signed by IGHI’s Professor the Lord Darzi  and highlights that the sanitation ‘crisis touches every moment of every child’s life, from birth to adulthood, if they are lucky enough to make it that far‘. (more…)