Heat can be deadly, killing more people each year than any other weather hazard. But as warmer days become our new normal — or, as some climate scientists call it, our “new abnormality” — the damaging effects of higher temperatures on our bodies may last much longer than you might think.
According to the World Health Organization, climate change is “the single greatest threat to human health.” And while that may sound like an exaggeration, experts say it’s not actually that far-fetched.
“There really are direct relationships between climate and health, and what we’re seeing in many cases is what we might call ‘climate-exacerbated disease,’” Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, director of emergency medicine at Columbia University, told Yahoo News.
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Why Extreme Heat Is Bad for Your Health Right Now
When you walk outside on a sweltering hot day, it’s easy to see how extreme heat can cause immediate damage. Heat stroke and heat exhaustion are probably the first conditions that come to mind. Heat stroke, Heat exhaustion, which occurs when the body loses its ability to cool and regulate its temperature, can cause permanent disability and even death, with the body temperature rising to 106°F or higher in less than 15 minutes. Heat exhaustion, with symptoms such as dizziness, nausea and headache, can lead to heat stroke unless treated immediately.
But extreme heat can also be harmful in less obvious ways, having a major impact on chronic diseases.
“Heat puts stress on your body, and when your body is stressed, it has a harder time dealing with other things, like heart disease or respiratory problems,” Tedeschi said. “For example, if you look at emergency room visits during extreme heat, more people present with heart attacks, more people present with strokes, and that’s honestly just a reflection of the stress on the body.”
Higher temperatures also tend to lead to poorer air quality, with extreme heat and stagnant air increasing levels of ozone and particulate pollution. And after you’ve been through some scorching heat, all that heat can also wreak havoc on your sleep, with even mild heat exposure keeping your body temperature elevated, affecting sleep stages and hindering your ability to fall and stay asleep.
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How High Temperatures Harm Your Health in the Long Run
“On an individual level, I think it’s about that heat stress over a significant period of time,” Tedeschi said. “If you’re constantly exposed to extreme heat or high temperatures that your body can’t handle, I think you’re honestly at risk for things that your body might otherwise be able to fight off.”
There are also wider downstream effects. Wildfire smoke — an all-too-familiar problem in much of the U.S., while blazes continue to smolder in Canada and California — has damaging health effects when those dangerous gases and particulates are inhaled, and the long-term impact of poor air quality caused by smoke can be damaging as well.
“There are probably some long-term effects of those small particles that we don’t fully understand yet,” Tedeschi said. “They go deep into the lungs, probably cause more inflammation and may be responsible for more chronic disease. Combined with the heat, that’s a really dangerous combination.”
Heat and drought, which are linked to climate change, are also prime conditions for a more intense wildfire season. This is expected to get worse as our planet warms. According to the Canadian Natural Resources Agency, climate change could double the area burned each year by the end of the century.
“I think about children who are chronically exposed to poor air quality, and that is absolutely a risk for chronic asthma,” Tedeschi said. “When you look at asthma rates and you look at the heat index and access to green space, there is a lot of correlation. And so I worry about children who are exposed to, for example, poor air quality in a way that they develop respiratory problems, or the problems that they already have may get worse over the course of their lives.”
The milder winters and earlier springs that make for a favorable wildfire season also give disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes and ticks a chance to thrive longer and expand their range into warmer parts of the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of reported illnesses from mosquito, tick and flea bites more than doubled between 2004 and 2018, to more than 760,000 reported cases nationwide.
And that’s not all that’s blooming as temperatures rise. The emergence of new, sometimes deadly, fungi that can infect humans is now a major concern for the World Health Organization, with Dr. Andrej Spec, an expert in fungal infections at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, telling Yahoo News: “As we warm up, we lose one of our greatest defenses against fungi: our body temperature.”
Mold, Spec explained, doesn’t do well at 98.6°F — the average human body temperature — and thrives at temperatures around 77°. But more extreme heat events are wiping out molds that can only survive in temperate environments and allowing more heat-resistant molds to flourish.
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The multitude of health problems arising from increasingly extreme heat will also exacerbate another, separate problem that has been flagged by the government. doctors and medical staff for years — the shortage of healthcare workers.
“Nationally, our emergency departments are overloaded and overcrowded,” Tedeschi said. “And when you think about an event that would drive a lot of people to an emergency department, like a “In a heat wave or poor air quality, overcrowding in our emergency departments is probably one of the biggest risks when it comes to mitigating these climate disasters.”
