Canadian Woman Clinically Diagnosed As Suffering From 'Climate Change' — A First In Medical History
Maybe world leaders should take this more seriously.
Elliott Cowand Jr / Shutterstock.com Global warming fears and imminent climate change crisis will end up affecting everyone in the world but hasn’t explicitly made it's way into health diagnoses — that is, until now.
A Canadian woman was the first patient in the entire world diagnosed to be suffering from “climate change” when she was admitted to the hospital for breathing problems.
She is the first of many people who will be diagnosed to suffer from 'climate change.'
Canada witnessed a record-breaking heatwave over the summer, killing nearly 600 people in British Columbia alone and leading experts to believe that global warming was the cause.
This was further exacerbated by wildfires that made the air quality in the province 43 times worse, causing the 70-something-year-old patient to develop asthma.
“She has diabetes. She has some heart failure. … She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning,” said Kyle Merritt, an emergency room doctor in Nelson, British Columbia.
“All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she's really struggling to stay hydrated.”
Climate change is harming the health of many Canadians.
Merritt told Glacier Media about the toll that the heatwave over the summer took on patients, who often had very little money, and were battling multiple health conditions at once.
The number of people entering the hospital as a result of the heatwave became so much at one point that Merritt called other doctors and nurses, in Prince George, Kamloops, Vancouver, and Victoria, for assistance.
“I was worried about the summer that was coming,” says Merritt of the rising number of healthcare workers desperate to talk about how climate change is affecting their patients’ health. “I was really quite amazed at how many people have decided to jump in.”
Roughly 40 doctors and nurses joined together as the Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health, where they could talk about the effects that climate change has on their patients and work on saving the planet.
This led to Meritt’s “climate change” diagnosis, saying “If we're not looking at the underlying cause, and we're just treating the symptoms, we're just gonna keep falling further and further behind.”
Climate change experts have been warning the world for years that irreversible damage to the Earth is imminent if world leaders and countries don’t take immediate action
During the winter months earlier this year, Texas was hit with its hardest snowstorm ever — causing $22.5 billion in damages and leaving nearly 10 million homes without electricity.
The United States has also been ravaged by wildfires all along the west coast, burning more than 6.5 million acres of land so far in 2021 and seeing the two largest wildfires in the country in the last 2 years.
The COP26 gathering of world leaders to talk about the climate crisis is a good first step in taking action, even though it was criticized by many climate activists including Greta Thunberg for “greenwashing.”
The food menu at the event failed to meet climate agreement recommendations made from the Paris Agreement in lowering the carbon footprint.
0.5 kg CO2e was the agreed-upon carbon footprint required in order to make a difference, while meals went nearly 7 times higher around 3.4 kg CO2e.
Climate change is no joke, and those who will suffer the most at the beginning will be those less fortunate than others — like the woman from Canada.
If there aren’t massive changes to carbon emissions in the next decade, the world could face catastrophic natural disasters and progress past the point of no return.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.