WiRED International Celebrates Earth Day 2016
BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW AND BERNICE BORN
T
his year Earth Day is Friday, April 22.
On the first Earth Day in 1970, people celebrated clean air, land and water. Forty-six years later, the planet’s survival is at risk. Climate change threatens and impacts our health, our environment and our economy.
Reduce, recycle, reuse. There are many ways to take action at home, on the road and in the office to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the risks associated with climate change. Planting trees, using clean energy or composting are examples of activities that can protect our environment. Many of these steps can save money; some, such as walking or biking to work, can even improve our health.
WiRED International emphasizes the connection between our health and our environment throughout all of its Learning Center modules. The WiRED team works in countries where increasing water contamination leads to cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery and many other life-threatening illnesses, and, in addition to offering educational modules on these conditions, we provide training on how to purify water. Worsening air pollution plagues many populations by inflicting asthma, COPD, emphysema and other lung diseases. We offer training modules on many of these illnesses as well.
Climate change, leading to increasing global temperatures, expands the range and reach of mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors, and they bring illnesses to regions where they were never before seen. Our modules on vector-borne diseases affected by climate change include malaria, chikungunya, Lyme disease and the most recent and frightening addition: Zika. Increasing temperatures in the United States are allowing the Aedes aegypti mosquito to venture into northern regions where they once could not survive. Moreover, warming temperatures hasten the growth of viruses and bacteria, accelerating the spread of diseases they cause. WiRED offers modules on bacterial, viral and parasitic infections impacted by climate change.
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WiRED addresses these illnesses, because we believe information gives people a chance to take precautions and recognize signs and symptoms, so they know when to seek medical help. We recognize, however, that reversing the conditions of climate change is the only way to stem the spread of many diseases.
On this Earth Day, all of us at WiRED join many others to call on world leaders to recognize the science that is measuring and reporting the warming of the planet. Look around at the elevated sea levels, the melting ice sheets, the increasing storms, heat waves, droughts and other intensifying weather conditions. Consider the immediate and long-range effects of climate change on human and animal health. We join the expanding chorus, imploring world leaders to recognize the problem and agree on policies that cut carbon emissions and put us on a sustainable path out of this. And, do it now.
The Earth is warming. The scientific evidence is clear. WiRED urges all of us to make every day Earth Day.
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