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Report raises alarm about deadly health effects of climate change

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Climate change is killing Americans in surprising ways, and the waste created by healthcare itself is part of the problem, says a report in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals.

The report, published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet, is part of a global study examining how climate change is affecting the world's health.

Climate change has created a health crisis that is getting worse and threatens to reverse the public health progress of the last 50 years, they say.

The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report has been published every year since 2016. This year's report calls on the world's nations and the United States to rapidly reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned while accelerating the transition to clean energy.

The health damage caused by climate change is “on the same scale as the damage associated with medical errors,” said Jonathan Buonocore, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University's School of Public Health and one of the paper's authors .

(According to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 250,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors.)

Climate change impacts the health of Americans in many ways. The report cites air pollution caused by fossil fuels, tropical cyclones made worse by climate change, the link of heat waves to premature births and future impacts of climate change.

On the positive side, the introduction of wind and solar energy in the US has resulted in an estimated 1,200 to 1,600 fewer premature deaths in the US in 2022 due to better air quality.

Healthcare waste is part of the problem, researchers say

The report highlights the healthcare sector's connection to climate change, as the industry accounts for 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers note that there is no national program mandating the measurement, management or disclosure of its data.

The figure includes not only the energy consumption of hospitals and clinics, but also the huge amounts of medical waste, often single-use plastic items, that are thrown away every day, Buonocore said.

All that single-use plastic is intended to help keep hospitals and operating rooms sterile, but researchers say there are ways to reduce waste without endangering patients.

The costs of heating and cooling are also an issue. HVAC systems in the operating room run 24 hours a day, whether there is a patient in them or not, Dr. Shaneeta Johnson, professor of surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Operating rooms generate a lot of waste

Operating rooms contribute to this in ways that patients may not think about, Johnson said.

“The operating room accounts for approximately 30% of medical waste in the United States,” she said. This includes disposable instruments, plastic wipes, syringes, tubes, bandages and anything that may be contaminated with bodily fluids. The disposal of medical waste is regulated by law and in many cases must be incinerated.

One thing hospitals have been working on is developing so-called “slim” surgical trays. This means that only the instruments that the surgeon is likely to need are sterilized and placed on surgical trays, rather than all the instruments that the surgeon may want. This is done by working with surgeons so they can choose the instruments they actually use and omit those that are not needed.

“There is significant opportunity to ‘slim’ surgical trays so we don’t have to autoclave as many instruments,” Johnson said. Studies show that such efforts can reduce a medical facility's carbon footprint.

An autoclave is a machine that subjects surgical supplies to hot steam under pressure to sterilize them.

“We need to work harder to reduce waste. Both physical waste and wasted resources through overdiagnosis and overtreatment. All of this would save the country a lot of money and drastically reduce the carbon footprint of our industry,” said Dr. Vivian Lee, author of “The Long Fix” and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, wrote on the topic.

She points out that in the United States, over 30 pounds of waste are produced daily for every patient in a hospital, largely due to the increasing amount of disposable items. Some of the waste comes from processes that are essentially useless. “Many professional societies have compiled long lists of unnecessary treatments, such as antibiotics for colds or X-rays for back pain. All of these wasted resources result in an excessive carbon footprint and very rarely help patients,” Lee said.

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