Health risks increased by climate change. - 6 Feb 2011  
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Indonesian Health Ministry's Director General of Disease Control and Environmental Health, Tjandra Yoga Aditama, recently warned that climate change is increasing people's vulnerability to illness across the nation. These include skin cancer and respiratory complications.

Furthermore, continued land degradation and its associated biodiversity loss, leading to variations in previously steady ecosystem patterns, would speed the spread of disease and the dwindling of water resources. Rising temperatures along extremes of both rainy and dry seasons also creates conditions more conducive for waterborne, airborne, and animal-borne disease.

Climate-related health hazards are also becoming increasingly apparent elsewhere in the world, as noted by Professor Tony McMichael of the National Center for Epidemiology and Population Health at Australian National University. Speaking with Supreme Master Television, Professor McMichael explained some of the fundamental necessities that are imperilled by climate change.

Professor Tony McMichael, PhD, National Center for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH), Australian National University (ANU) (M): The basic essentials for health I think, are: a secure food supply, a good fresh water supply, normal constraints, limitations on the spread of infectious agents, reasonable protections against physical hazards, sort of protection that's provided by intact coastal zones, mangrove swamps, forests, and so on, and a reasonable stable climate system.

Those things are absolutely crucial in the long term for human wellbeing, health and, of course, survival. And those are the things that have been put at risk by climate change and by these other enormous environmental changes that we are seeing in these modern times.

VOICE: Eco-conscious protective measures are thus vital to our future. Professor Tony McMichael, PhD (M): This is a chance for us to think seriously about how we can live sustainably in ways that are convivial and congenial, not competitive, don't involve unpleasantness and conflict, don't involve inequities whereby some people miss out on scarce resources because they're being overused and poorly managed.

VOICE: Professor McMichael and Indonesia's Health Ministry, we appreciate your thoughtful efforts to raise awareness of such worrisome yet important information. Let us seek to adopt the most eco-caring measures to benefit the environment and all beings with whom we share the Earth.

Supreme Master Ching Hai has frequently highlighted the urgent necessity for a global shift to more wholesome, eco-friendly lifestyles, as during a July 2008 videoconference with Supreme Master Television staff in California, USA.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: According to the scientists, there could be more than just one disaster. Rising sea level is not the only worrying event, disease will also rise. They already do so in some parts of the world. If it has to happen, it happens. But please do not concentrate on these negative phenomena. Rather, we spend energy in constructive actions and positive thinking and we have to envision a more beautiful world.

Unless people change to a more benevolent lifestyle that is respecting all lives, then we will beget life and our lives be spared. The more vegetarian people join the circle, the more chance we have to save the planet.

http://www.vdh.state.va.us/epidemiology/DEE/Vectorborne/
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/01/21/climate-change-increases-health-risks.html