 Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. I'm glad you could join us today. With me today in the Think Tech studio is Dr. Dara O'Carroll. Dara's been on a couple times before. Welcome again. Yeah, good to be back. Yeah, it's always a pleasure to have a good articulate passion MD year on to talk about medical stuff which is likeable science because it impacts impacts all of us, right? Of course. And we're gonna be talking today actually about sort of a topic that's beginning to be more relevant every day to all of us, right? Yeah. Just sort of we're on the edge of it right now. It's how climate change is impacting human health. Yes, yeah. And so I think anybody with a scientific framework or anybody who's, I don't want to say has half a brain but at least a quarter of a brain, if they've been following any of the developments around the world is that our climate is changing and it's changing quickly. Right. And I don't think it's an argument anymore. And there's a lot of people who feel that way, especially the International Panel for Climate Change, the IPCC used the foremost body on this whole science and literature is overwhelmingly saying humans are affecting our climate. And what is happening is it's our CO2 production and our other greenhouse gases that are causing this. I don't think that's a question. But just like any disease process happens, the earth is now kind of gradually having this incremental change and it's pretty much creating a process that's charging the earth. The more heat that we have, the more energy the earth has. And it's changing disease processes that are happening across the globe. Right. And in a number of very different sorts of ways, right? I mean, yeah, in ways that are kind of obvious. Right. And then in ways that are not so obvious. And we can go over those. Exactly. Yeah. And it's happening, I mean, around the world, it takes sort of different forms in different places with different populations. But basically, sort of the bottom line is more and more, and it's likely to be more and more in the future. It is really going to be, this climate change is really going to affect the health of people all over the globe. Sure, it's a new world. Yeah, it's a new world. Yeah. So I think the most obvious one is that storms are becoming more frequent. Right. Since 1980, big storms, you know, are now double in frequency. And they're even trying to possibly create a new category of storm. That's right. Talking about having to add to the hurricane force. Yeah, there's category five. But now you're getting the storms that have sustained winds of 200 miles per hour. Like where do you go from there? Yeah. A sustained winds of 200, that's, you know, tornado velocity, but in a much wider breath. Yeah. And so these cyclones are ripping through, you know, the Philippines and really just just, you know, creating wild, wild havoc. And so the rate that you're going to, that you're going to get injured, or you're going to have some sort of illness from a storm flood or any of those is now going to if rates of carbon dioxide do not decrease by 2040, it'll be 50 fold chance that you're going to get hurt in a storm throughout any given year. Yeah, just really frightening changes coming up and one can only envision if one of these big super storms hits in some place like the coast of Bangladesh, low line area. Yeah, I think we've got a picture of a super storm. I'm not sure which one this was, but yeah, there we go. So these storms are really, really intense. And so the number of floods, landslides and avalanches has quadrupled since 1980 as well. So all of those are a higher risk. We just had a big flood in Chile. You know, there's a lot of floods going down in Australia at the moment as well. It was one last year in Oregon. Washington slid down and whole mudslide buried part of the town there. Yeah, and the Lancet came out with a study that said by the end of the century, 150,000 people per year in Europe could be affected and be killed by these extreme weather events. So I think that's the most obvious in our sphere of we're seeing storms, they get covered by the news, we see the landslides. Yeah, there's heat events and drought events again in the same extreme events. Yeah, yeah, but either one can kill. And then the ones that are kind of less obvious is the vector born disease or zoonotic diseases or diseases that are transferred by ticks or or mosquitoes or any of any other kind of insects or animals. Right, because the change in climate is changing their range or their timing of season when they're active. You've got a more humid in world, you've got a more hot, a hotter world, you're going to have more territory that mosquitoes and ticks can survive in and in longer periods. So if we've jumped to the next slide, we've got something that affected a moose here. And so behind me is a ghost moose. And so they call these ghost mooses because the really ghost moose aren't supposed to be white. And what they're doing is they're they're rubbing off these ticks that are just infesting them. So it's not only is it happening to moose, it's happening to us. They're rubbing off their fur and they're rubbing off their fur because they have up to 100,000 ticks on them, which is just completely, I mean, 100,000 on these majestic animals are really bleeding them dry. And so these aren't the same ticks that affect humans. Deer ticks are the ones that's predominantly bite humans, and especially in the northeast, but they transfer all host of tick borne diseases and predominant one is Lyme disease. And Lyme disease can be a very indolent and incessant disease. But acutely, it can cause severe problems such as Bell's palsy or facial droop, heart block, you can have all sorts of arrhythmias from it. And chronically, it can cause memory loss, nerve problems, joint issues, and people deal with these for sometimes a lifetime when they get Lyme disease. So that's terrible. That's gonna get it become more common. Yeah, and the rates of it are skyrocketing in the northeast and becoming more more prevalent. malaria is now had an outbreak in Southern Europe when it hasn't been there in 100 years. I haven't heard that. Yeah, dengue is is on the move as well. Zika virus, everything is sort of kind of making moves. All because we're getting basically a warmer or hospitable climate for disease carrying insects, basically. Yeah. And then it's, you know, going on the warm, warm aspect, cholera as well, if we jump to the next slide is a picture of a girl in Bangladesh. Well, behind us is behind me is a tick. There we go. So that's that's the deer tick. Okay. Yeah. The next slide is a girl of in Bangladesh. And I mean, Bangladesh is one of the lowest lying countries in most density densely populated countries in the world. And what they're seeing is what, you know, Florida may see pretty soon. And so cholera is a disease of water inequality and water sanitation issues. But when you mix higher levels of sea higher sea levels, plus more higher temperatures, cholera has this prolific effect where it just becomes much more rapid. And so rates of cholera in Bangladesh are always been high, but they're getting higher. And thankfully, there's been some public health initiatives where they've distributed some vaccines. And that has helped to call it but they keep seeing outbreak after outbreak. And one place where things have succeeded in keeping the outbreak at bay is the in Cox Bazaar, the Rohingya camp. And so one million people they distributed an oral vaccine, which comes in two doses. And that has helped to keep them from experiencing a bad cholera outbreak. So so cholera is one. If we jump to the next slide, there's something called harmful algal bloom. So you can see behind me. And on that screen is that I mean, that's just a soupy mix of, I don't know, somebody blended some spinach into the whole Great Lakes. And so these carry all sorts of problems if you ingest or around them too much. One is cyanobacteria. And those can cause a lot of a lot of nerve issues. They can even cause seizures. And then the red tides, right? Yeah, which I don't have a photo of, but the red tides, I can have dino flagellates in them. And they have something called as brevetoxin, which can cause even on land can cause issues. So if you've got a red tide on the coast, it can actually secrete this brevetoxin into the air and up to one mile inland, it can cause asthma like issues bronchospasm, which is especially important for people with asthma, because it'll cause their asthma to become much more severe and worse. Oh, yeah. awful, awful. Okay, then we have some water source issue diseases, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, those were sort of the water, the other water issues, but we've got some heat related issues as well. I mean, just in general, heat, I mean, with climate change, the old term for it was global warming, but we want to be a little bit more specific as the climate is changing. And so the world is getting hotter. And where it's going to get the hottest is in our cities, right? Because our cities have something called the urban heat island effect, right? Because they don't have cooling plants and green trees and all these things that help evaporation and provide shade and get everything cool and said they just the cement building is just, yeah, they hold on to everything. And then the cement buildings all have AC in them, which are putting out heat as well. Yeah. And so there's a picture of downtown LA where they're they're they're feeling it as well. And where I used to work in a ER and we saw a lot of homeless, predominantly homeless with heat strokes coming in. And the the the 2003 heat wave that happened in Europe, 70,000 people died in that week to 10 days span 12,000 people alone in Paris, predominantly is people in the elderly population or people with chronic diseases such as heart failure and kidney failure. But as people who can, you know, really help themselves otherwise, is that you know, they may be stuck in an old apartment or an old building that's from the 1800s that has never experienced heat like this in a prolonged period like this. And then how do they get away? Yeah. And I mean, we've had what were the last five years have been record breaking heat, right? Yes, the five hottest years or four, four hottest years on record have been in the last five years. Yeah. You don't have to be like a genius to figure out where the trend is going. Yeah, I know it's cold now in Hawaii and in North America. But I mean, is that's that polar vortex where the hot air from the Southern Hemisphere is drawing the cold air down and that polar vortex is not keeping the air in the Arctic where it should be. So just because it's cold now and this aggravates me when Donald Trump says, can we bring back global warming? You know, doesn't mean that global warming or climate change is gone. Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's it's that's again, it's one of these big problems that really show is the sort of the global nature of this whole thing. Yes. This whole issue of how just how these changing climates in all the different ways, different mechanisms of physical mechanisms for physiological mechanisms, the disease vector mechanisms, the change in ocean and surface water temperatures, all these different things. So this is this is great. It's not great. It's awful. But it's great that we're learning about it. It's great that we're beginning to do some things about it, that more people are taking knowledge of it, gaining an understanding of it. I think at this point, we have to go off to a first break though. Okay, we'll be back. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 AM. Aloha. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in, and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there, and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. And welcome back to Likeable Science here on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Dr. Dara O'Carroll is with me today in the studio, and we're talking about how climate change is impacting our health in mostly negative ways, right? Yeah. Yeah. The only positive way I can think of is that up to about a degree Celsius or so, a degree and a half might increase food production. But above that, it's going to decrease food production. Yeah. And we were talking about before our break, we're talking about heat impacts and some of the more sort of obvious cases that we've had recently, the huge heat death, heat relief deaths in Europe that you mentioned a few years ago and all that. But you were telling me during the break about a sort of special case of this. Yeah. Yeah. There's something called, unfortunately, Mesoamerican nephropathy or nephritis. And what it is Mesoamerica being the area from like mid-Mexico south all the way down to the northern South American countries, Guatemala, Colombia. And it's mostly on the Pacific side of these countries where there's a mysteriously, there was a group of specific group of males 30 to 50 years old, all agricultural workers who were coming in with kidney failure. And they presumed that first there was a lot of hypotheses where there was toxins because they're all around pesticides. It was banana farms, sugarcane, coffee, that sort of thing. And they've gradually over the process of studying this since the 1980s, 1990s have ruled out the toxin phenomenon because it's starting to happen in Thailand. It's starting to happen in Sri Lanka. And they're using different chemicals. And you know when they studied the blood tests of all these these young males they didn't find any evidence of hard, hard chemical indolence. And what it comes down to is that they were just getting chronically dehydrated from being out in the sun and working that hard. So the process of being dehydrated on a chronic basis just really took a toll on their kidneys. And so they come in and the typical presentation of kidney failure is that you've got swelling in your legs, you're feeling a little fatigued, sometimes you get a little bit confused if that's really progressed. But unfortunately most of these guys live in rural areas, agricultural areas, and they can't afford dialysis. Dialysis in itself is a life-changing event. You've got to be somewhere for three hours a day, three times a week. And a lot of them perish. And it's one of the most predominant leading causes of death in this group of people in Mesoamerica and now Sri Lanka and Thailand. And that's got to have wide-ranging effects because lots of them are adults, husbands and fathers. And so their families are then left without a wage earner. Right, yeah. And they're the breadwinners of a lot of these families. And so it's terrible. It would seem though that should be reasonably dealable with, right? I mean, you should just get more water to those guys and tell them, hey, every 15, 20 minutes stop and slug down some water. Yeah, even that doesn't help as much as just being in the heat for that long. And so, I mean, this wasn't happening in the 80s and 90s or started happening in the late 80s, 90s, this wasn't happening before. And so I don't know if you can argue that with this fact that like climate is changing the way it affects humans, you know? Yeah. And then on moving on to air pollution, there's a little bit of smog behind me in LA. But that's another obvious. And people are track air quality, air quality index and smog, predominantly ozone, ground level ozone that's in smog, which is three oxygen molecules, really harmful to the lungs. It causes asthma problems. It causes COPD or emphysema problems. Even rates of visits to the ER and lost workdays, all skyrocket when the air quality index is getting worse. And it's a very complex problem too because it's actually can be, I gather, a mixture of man-made sources and natural sources. The terpenes and things of plants are dumping out. Yeah. Then interact in some manner with a lot of these man-made pollutants to make more irritating compounds and compounds that are more harmful. Yeah. Yeah. And if we move to the next slide, I think we have a diagram. Well, this is, if we jump to the big picture of it, yeah, this diagram here is kind of how these particulate matter or all these smog and terpenes that Ethan just mentioned affect the body. So really the process is of the pharynx, which is basically your back of your throat from your nose all the way down to the biggest part of your airway, the trachea. There's two functions that it serves. One is to humidify the air. So by the time the air gets down into your lungs, it's 100% humidified. So that's why the fact of breathing, you lose water. So that's why, if you're living in a dry environment, make sure you're drinking water. But two is to catch all these particulate matter and things that are in the air. And so if it's got so we're talking on microns here. So coarse particles are around 10 microns or a little bit less. And so your upper airways will catch those. They've got little hairs that are lining the upper airways that kind of bring everything back up. And that's why you've got to clear your throat and that sort of nature. But the fine particles that are less than 2.5 microns or even the ultra fine particles that are less than one or the really, really fine that are less than 0.1, they go all the way down into your lung and your alveoli where you're actually where you are transferring oxygen. Right. These are all these little sacks in your lungs. Yeah. These tiny little pumpkins. Yeah. And if you're chronically exposed to bad air that is getting all the way down here with carbon material, wildfires that are causing soot to be dispersed in the air, rates of obviously lung cancer, even rates of heart attack are increased when air quality is is poor. So it's really something that can really affect your health. Right. Again, this is something that we have a good deal of control over in theory. We could choose if we have this social will basically to control that more tightly. Yeah. But indeed, right now our political leaders are trying to loosen controls on some of that. Right. And coal is such an old technology. Why are we trying to go back to old and dirty technology where you're just ruining the environment? And then again, this compounds with increased heat you know, and makes everything worse, right? Oh yeah. The hotter the environment is, the more ozone is going to be going to be made when you combine that with the smog and the particulate matter that's in the air. You know, you're really asking for trouble. Yeah. And so I think the next slide shows a big picture of a fire that was in up all the way up in Northern Alberta. And you can see the smoke plume. This is a satellite photo going all the way down into the middle of the United States, into the Midwest. And so you could have a fire so far away, but this particulate matter is dumping on you, you know, hundreds to 1500 kilometers in displacement. Yeah. That was a very bad case that last summer for a while, Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon had the distinction of having the worst air quality of any city in the world for several days because of fires that were happening up in British Columbia. There were 100 worst fires going on at once and all that smoke and particulates were coming right down over Seattle and Portland. Yeah. Making air. I heard one once we're saying there's equivalent to smoking eight packs of cigarettes a day or something if you're outside. Yeah. No, that's, that's, that's terrible. You don't want to be a subject to your body to that. You know, every insult you have increases your rate for problems in the future. And I believe our next photo shows another satellite photo of well, here's, here's, we'll get on the topic of drought. And so we're going to have a warmer planet which is going to change the rates and where our, where our water is being displaced. Right. And a lot of the areas that are already hot and dry are going to get hotter and drier. Correct. Yeah. You're going to have wetter spots, but you're also going to have hotter and drier spots. And so you're going to have increased dust storms. You're going to have water issues. You're going to have a lot of problems keeping people hydrated who are already having issues. Right. Well, we already, in some of these less developed nations, women and girls particularly are spending significant amount of time getting water for their families. Yeah. They have to walk half an hour, an hour, two hours in some cases to go and get water. Yeah. And if it's hotter and drier, that situation is only going to get worse. Yeah. And clean water especially. Right. You know, there might be water that's close by, but it might be with the hotter temperatures you're going to have more of the algae in it, more of the cholera that are in it, and more of the issues as well. You know, I've had on this on my show earlier a guy with it who makes something called Muddy Drops, which are a poor ceramic tablet and a silver infusion. You drop that into water and it knocks out all your pathogens very neatly. Well, it's a wonderful technology. I suspect it's going to become more widespread. Yeah. Let's hope we're not going to need it as much, but it's there for you if we need it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, droughts are obviously a devastating phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. And the next slide shows a photo of a dust storm that's coming off the Sahara Desert and this is really, really mind blowing to me is that you could see Spain in the upper right corner there and that dust storm is as big as Spain. Which is halfway across the Atlantic. Yeah. And it's moving across the Atlantic and that dust will go ahead and deposit all the way over in Florida and the Caribbean. And so dust is marvelously good at transporting pathogens, fungi, influenza can even go across it, other viruses and bacteria. Every gram of dust, you can take a pinch of it in your fingers, about 100,000 bacteria live in that dust. And so when this is sprinkling over other areas, it's increasing the rate of disease that are transported across the globe. Yeah, spreading stuff all around. Yeah. And so you've got dust going from North Africa to North America. You've also got vice versa. You've got a lot of dust coming from the Mongolian plains in China and coming down and sweeping over the Southeast countries, but also Taiwan, Japan, even across Pacific over it, over it's in North America as well. So it comes coming from both sides and you've got if you've got drier climates, it's only going to increase. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's just going to be worse. That's and then there the other effective course of drought is that drought means typically less productive farming. Right. Typically farmers cannot grow as much because most plants, all plants need water. And typically the more, in a lot of cases, up to a certain point at least, the more water you have, the better, the healthier, the bigger plants you get in the middle of a drought. Your plants wither, they die. You don't have that food supply. You're eating less food, less healthy food. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And you're opening yourself up then for all kinds of other illnesses as well as probably dietary insufficiencies. Right. Yeah, completely. And then you look at the world's oceans with the increasing acid levels in pH that is happening and our coral reefs that are disappearing, that whole ecosystem may completely be altered and changed. And so what the, our fishing supply may completely be gone. Yes. I was reading a while ago that it's something like three billion people on this planet already, more or less directly depend on fish for some significant part of their protein. And something like 17 out of the major 19 fisheries on this planet are considered threatened or endangered basically that they're collapsing or already collapsed. And when that gets a little bit worse, I mean they're already fishing down the food chain to a smaller fish and all that. That's, we're just going to lose a little chunk of food supply and more and more people are not going to get the protein they need and. Yep. Yeah. No. It's, it's, it's, let's hope that something is, is done about it. But there's a lot of ways that our food supply is really going to be affected. Yeah. Yeah. And then our next slide, I believe, is our last one and we can jump to a big photo of that as well. That's a study that came out just in November of 2018. So very recently. And you can just briefly, this is a Southern Bangladesh, a little bit north of Cox Bazaar and a place called Chakria. And the darker red colors in Maroon are, where rates of miscarriages were curiously found to be a lot higher than the rest of the countries. So the rest of the country was down around 8 to 7 to 8%. And some of these areas were having miscarriages around of 13 to 14%. And all of these areas were closer to the river. And what was happening is that the sea level is rising and spilling back into the, into these rivers and depositing salinity and salt into their drinking water. And so when you intake too much salt and they were on the order of normal salt should be around 5 grams give or take per day. Some of these women were in taking around 17 grams. And when you increase salt it's going to increase your blood pressure. And especially during pregnancy it's very detrimental. And you can have rates of preeclampsia and miscarriages, which they saw here. So this is a way obvious way that's not so obvious that climate is affecting health but also increasing miscarriages. Yeah, and if it's happening there there's lots of places around the coast of the world where we're getting saline intrusion into groundwater that people are using for drinking. So again this problem we're seeing a little bit of it now and we're likely to be seeing more of it. Yeah, the Mekong Delta all Cambodia Laos and China are really going to start seeing it next. And what happens when again it had Hurricane Sandy spills a lot of seawater into the New York drinking pot or into Florida. So All the Pacific Islands. Yeah, yeah. Carabas, you know, is literally sinking and they're six feet or less above water now. So what are they going to do with theirs? No, no. It's truly, truly this is pretty amazing. I have to say in some sense there are you have helped me make one of the least likable episodes likable science. Unlikable science? But it's relevant science and it really shows how we need science to inform us of these problems so we can at least take the action we need. Yeah. So I thank you very much for coming on and giving us such a such a great view of these multi-faceted changes here. Thank you, Dara. And I hope you'll come back and join us next week on another episode of Likable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii.