VOA常速英语:《柳叶刀》报告--气候变化损害儿童身体健康

After nearly eight years, California emerged from its longest drought of the millennium, just before the start of a fire season.
Experts say higher temperatures from climate change make for drier vegetation which provides ready fuel for wildfires.
This is just one example of how a warming planet will affect public health in the future, says Dr. Nick Watts, executive director of the Lancet Countdown.
“If we continue down sort of current, current trajectory, it comes close to wiping out the last 50 years of gains that we have seen in public health all around the world.”
An international report by the Lancet Countdown says a baby born today is likely to see the earth warm four degrees by his or her 71st birthday.
“In terms of the health impacts of climate change, this is anything from the spread of vector-borne diseases like dengue, like malaria.

It’s pretty vitriolic and that particularly again, it’s children under the age of five that are the most vulnerable.”
Watt says as climates warm unwelcome disease vectors will thrive like the Asian tiger mosquito.
“It’s moving up from Turkey, coming across Europe.
That target mosquito carries dengue fever.
It carries chikungunya when it’s there.
It carries yellow fever.
If you’re in South America that target mosquitoes can carry Zika virus as well.”
Scientists are most concerned about the overall long-term impact of global warming on public health.
“We don’t worry about just heatwave and what that does to heart disease or kidney disease.
We’re not worried about just malnutrition.
We’re worried about what happens to a community, to a population, to a child born today
when they are hit again and again and again by, from multiple different angles,
and how that has a lifelong impact the whole way through.”
Researchers say it will take political will to avert dire outcomes.
The authors are calling for next month’s United Nations climate conference to focus on the health impacts of a warming planet.