Climate change is an issue that keeps on getting more complex and present in our daily lives. Ten years ago talking about climate change was like talking about the apocalypse: something that was eventually going to come but not in our lifetimes. However, strong rains, heat and cold waves, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis are becoming more and more common on the news, and the effects of this nature forces have widely changed the lives of millions of people's and the economical and social structures of many countries.
In 2009 I happened to be in L'Aquila, Italy, when an earthquake of a 6.0 magnitude in the Richer scale destroyed the old medieval town in the rural outskirts of the state of Abruzzo. My family and I were spending the Easter Holidays at my grandmother's house that Spring, and we had the misfortune of living through this natural disaster that completely destroyed the town's historical center and the surrounding villages. Luckily, my grandmother's house remained standing, and we were able to evacuate quickly; but still, the trembling and the images of the walls cracking and my family screaming and running is something that I won't ever forget. I'm writing about this because I noticed in the chart that one of the effects of natural disasters from the public health approach has to do with mental health.
As the years have passed and I have returned to L'Aquila and seen how the city has been progressively reconstructed, I can tell that the effects of the earthquake are still in people's minds and hearts. Those days right after the disaster were horrible, people were very upset, about losing their houses, their city, and some of their friends and family members; and the media didn't make it easier by being alarmist and emotional by telling personal stories on the disaster. I lived through the mental breakdown and the delicate emotional state in which people in the refugee camps and coastline hotels were, and being in Italy didn't help the cause because society there is even more culturally dramatic. For about months, the earthquake was the only thing my grandmother could talk about, and she always ended up crying when telling the story over and over again. I know about marriages that ended because of the tensions and pressures that this issue had over some couples.
Public health institutions could have made this situation better if they had monitored, diagnosed and dealt with the issue of the mental effects. Media content could have been regulated not to be so alarmist, recreation programs for kids in the refugee camps could have been held to distract them from these dramas and psychological help could have been offered in the refugee camps and the coastline hotels were people who had lost their homes where staying for free.
Another example of an essential service of public health professionals in order to deal with climate change events would have been preparation and prevention. Even though an earthquake can't be predicted, Italy is in a seismic zone and people and hospitals should have been better prepared in both material and mental resources for an issue this big.
Regarding to what are public health institutions in my hometown doing in order to prepare people for climate change I sadly need to answer that nothing. If a natural disaster as strong as L'Aquila's earthquake hits us, it would be the end of Caracas because with do not have strong firefighter bodies or a proper civil society structure strong enough to deal with the great material, social, economical and mental damages.
These last couple of years heavy rains have been a huge problem that have caused the displacement of many families who lived in slums and other improper structures that have been literally washed away, and they still have not been placed in other homes. In fact, we didn't even have the resources to set up refugee camps, so these misplaced persons have been staying in government offices that have been closed in order to provide them with a roof.
The mental health effects of disasters like this can be significant. Makes having a good infrasturcture to respond to something like what your family went through all the more important, because if there is no infrastructure to take care of the physical flal out, then the mental health aspects go un treated as well.
ReplyDeleteI for one like to eat, and would be personally affected by droughts, floods and ecosystem changes, as food would not be as plentiful, would be more expensive, and more prone to cause food-borne disease. That alone is enough for me to be interested in advocating for sustainable practices in industry and agriculture that would not impact our environment so much.
Mitigation efforts to slow, stabilize, or reverse climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are similar to the idea of primary prevention. Adaptation efforts - anticipating and preparing for the effects of climate change, so as to reduce the associated health burden - are similar to the concepts of secondary and tertiary prevention