New book warns climate change is making us sick

Typography

In 2008, Jay Lemery, MD, an emergency physician in Colorado, read a commentary about the effects of global climate change on human health. The author was Paul Auerbach, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford and one of the world’s leading authorities on wilderness medicine.

In 2008, Jay Lemery, MD, an emergency physician in Colorado, read a commentary about the effects of global climate change on human health. The author was Paul Auerbach, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford and one of the world’s leading authorities on wilderness medicine.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the article caught Lemery’s attention.

“What I immediately thought was we need to have a physician movement around this,” said Lemery, associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado and section chief of wilderness and environmental medicine.

Now, a decade later, Lemery has co-authored a book with Auerbach that delves into the growing health issues touched upon in that 2008 article — the countless, frightening ways that climate change is increasing allergens, creating toxic algal blooms, inducing heat stress, causing air degradation, and creating water and food insecurity. The book, Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health, not only calls on physicians, but everyone on the planet, to take note. The book is scheduled to be published in October.

Continue reading at Stanford University

Photo: Paul Auerbach, MD

(Credit: Stanford University)