Plateful of Pain

Climate change will make the disease burden more complex. Breakthroughs may help the affluent, but the poor will not have access to even basic healthcare.

- Vibha Varshney

OUR HEALTH, 25 years from now, would be the sum total of the daily impacts of a degrading environment on our bodies. Triggers such as air pollution, toxins in water and food and climate change would work synergically. Different permutations and combinations of communicable and non-communicable diseases would weaken our bodies.

Climate change would possibly be the biggest cause for diseases 25 years from now. A warmer world would help vectors proliferate and expand their territories. Deadly new diseases would emerge from dried-up forests, piggybacking on animals that would have nothing to sustain them there. We have no idea what these new zoonotic diseases would be and have no drugs to treat them. Our inability to deal with the Zika epidemic is a rude reminder of our helplessness. Even known enemies like cholera would spread to newer areas in a warmer world and extreme weather events such as sudden rain. Heat strokes would become more common.

There are reports that link climate change with mental stress too. Climate change and extreme weather events would destroy crops, and persistent droughts would dry up forestlands, which would have been otherwise an alternative source for foodstuff. This would perpetuate food scarcity. As a result, some parts of the world would have to deal with chronic malnutrition.