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Climate change kills. Since 2000, nearly four million people worldwide have lost their lives due to floods, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events that have been linked to a steadily warming planet, according to a recent estimate in the journal Nature. That sweeping number can make it hard for any of us to grasp how the problem is touching health in our own small part of the world. Now, a new study in Nature Medicine provides some of that granular insight for people living in the U.S., exploring how climate-linked disasters affect visits to hospital emergency departments in counties nationwide, as well as related deaths in the aftermath of the disasters. The numbers, the researchers found, are troubling, with the hardest-hit communities showing mortality rates as much as 3.8 times higher than those in surrounding areas.
“This could be a significant strain for hospitals and emergency departments, especially if they are damaged, lack power, or are short-staffed,” says Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study.
To conduct their work, Salas and her co-authors surveyed health records in emergency departments of major hospitals in more than 4,800 counties nationwide that had suffered billion-dollar storms—measured by property loss, insurance claims, the cost of government recovery efforts, and more—from 2011 to 2016. They focused their research on Medicare patients only, for a number of reasons. People with private insurance may pick up or lose coverage as they change jobs, making for an incomplete dataset, while Medicare coverage, once begun, is typically continued for life. What’s more, senior citizens make up the population most vulnerable to death, injury, or illness related to climate change. Finally, Medicare is taxpayer funded, and studying the health effects of climate change—and the hit on the public pocketbook that results—is important in establishing…
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