Rural Australia faces more illness from climate change
Rural Australia faces more illness from climate change
7 April 2008
published by www.abc.net.au
Australia — Australian doctors have warned that people in living rural and remote areas will be the hardest hit with illness caused by climate change.
The group, Doctors for the Environment, has released a report for World Health Day today, called Climate Change Health Check 2020.
Co-author Professor Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, says rural residents will in future face more disease spread by mosquitoes, as well as the problems that are already caused by heat and drought.
“There are concerns for mental health, the tragedy of suicide rates in impoverished and dislocated farming families,” he says.
“But there are many physical health problems too, food supplies, fresh water supplies, issues of exposure to extremes of temperature, dust, and bushfires and so on.”
