When warming effects health

Feeling health? As hotter temperatures create more severe weather patterns, health experts fear that our supplies of air an water may be tainted, while insects may spread more disease.
It’s fair bet that global warming is going to lead to a rise in human sickness and death. But it’s a bit too soon to predict the specifics. We can be pretty sure that as average temperatures climb, there will be more frequent and longer heat waves of the sort that contributed to the death of at least 20,000 Europeans in august 2003. Other predications more tenuous. For example, rising temperatures could-if rainfall and other conditions are right- results in larger most- quinto populations at higher elevations I the tropics, which could in turn contribute to the spread of malaria, dengue and other insect-borne infections. Early indications are not encouraging. The World Health Organization (WHO) believes that even the modest increases in average temperature that have occurred since the 1970s have begun to take a toll. Climate changes responsible for at least 150,000 extra deaths a year-a figure that will double by 2030, according to WHO’S conservative estimate. As whit so many public-health issues, a disproportionate part of the burden appears to be falling on the poorest of the poor. That doesn’t mean, however, that the comparatively wealthy-who account for more than their share of greenhouse-gas emissions-will escape harm. A look at three key factors affected by warming offers a hint of things to come.