Source: The BMJ: British Medical Journal

Articles from this source (8)

Housing and climate: UK homes need urgent adaptation to protect our health

  2023-10-05 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

We must ensure that health is once again central to all housing policy, say Isobel Braithwaite and colleagues The climate emergency is already affecting our homes,1 and it will drive a range of key health risks in the coming decades.2 Many of these are closely connected to our housing system, including overheating and increased flood risks. This situation is further exacerbated in the UK by its wider housing crisis, with high levels of unaffordability—particularly in the private rental sector—as well as low tenure security, rising rates of homelessness and use of temporary accommodation, and an ageing and poor qua...

  Tagged under: Climate Change | Housing | Health | Committee on Climate Change UK

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Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS): cohort study

  2023-08-17 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

Objective To evaluate the effect of protracted low dose, low dose rate exposure to ionising radiation on the risk of cancer. Design Multinational cohort study. Setting Cohorts of workers in the nuclear industry in France, the UK, and the US included in a major update to the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS). Participants 309 932 workers with individual monitoring data for external exposure to ionising radiation and a total follow-up of 10.7 million person years. Main outcome measures Estimates of excess relative rate per gray (Gy) of radiation dose for mortality from cancer. Results The study included 103...

  Tagged under: Nuclear Power | France

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Air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health and children are especially vulnerable

  2023-05-17 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

I studied medicine at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1989. Over six years as an undergraduate I was taught the science of medicine by teachers who were superb scientists and clinicians. I graduated with a keen sense of pathology, anatomy, microbiology and all the specialties. Unsurprisingly, I was acutely aware of how the politics of the day impacted on how I practised medicine in South Africa and from a very early undergraduate stage it didn’t take a genius to realise that ethnicity had a direct impact on the pattern of diseases and patient outcomes. Yet we were not taught about the social determinants of heal...

  Tagged under: Africa | Health | Women and Children

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Individual responsibility: a red herring that lets the fossil fuel industry off the climate catastrophe hook

  2022-11-01 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

On the eve of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum, Kent Buse and colleagues argue that the health of people and planet can only be rescued through government led, structural transformations—but for that to happen we need to re-frame the narrative When delegates meet this week to discuss fragile progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, they do so against a bleak backdrop. The line that “climate change is the biggest health challenge of the 21st century” is an understatement. Climate change is not only a challenge to health, but to human development—and even survival.1 The evidence on...

  Tagged under: Climate Change | Health

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MPs will be briefed on climate change after health leaders back hunger striker’s demands

  2022-05-22 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

A man ended a hunger strike of more than five weeks outside the UK parliament on 19 April after it was confirmed that MPs would be briefed on the climate crisis by the chief scientific officer, Patrick Vallance. The decision was made four days after senior health professionals, including the current and former editors in chief of The BMJ , wrote to the prime minister urging him to commit to holding a briefing. …

  Tagged under: Climate Change | Health

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Climate crisis: Over 200 health journals urge world leaders to tackle “catastrophic harm”

  2021-09-06 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

More than 200 health journals have called on governments to take emergency action to tackle the “catastrophic harm to health” from climate change. A joint editorial says that while recent targets to reduce emissions and conserve biodiversity are welcome, they are not enough and need to be matched with credible short and longer term plans.1 The editorial was published simultaneously on 6 September in 233 international titles including The BMJ , the Lancet , the New England Journal of Medicine , the East African Medical Journal , the Chinese Science Bulletin , the National Medical Journal of India , and the Medical J...

  Tagged under: Climate Change | Africa | Health | India

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Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health

  2021-09-06 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster The UN General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the des...

  Tagged under: COP26 | Climate Change | Health | Women and Children | Biodiversity Loss

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The health case for urgent action on climate change

  2021-09-06 (or before) in The BMJ: British Medical Journal

Health professionals have a leading role It is about 30 years since warnings first appeared in prominent journals about the potential for large and wide ranging effects on human health from climate and other global environmental changes.123 To date, global action to tackle these burgeoning threats remains inadequate both in scale and in speed. For example, the pledged nationally determined contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions—as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change—are a first step, but even if fully implemented (and this is by no means certain), global average temperatures are still...

  Tagged under: Oceans | Extreme Rainfall | Greenhouse Gases | Climate Change | Health

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