Climate change and global health with Dr. Sadath Sayeed
On Monday, April 22, Dr. Sadath Sayeed, Director of Global Health at UCLA, gave a presentation in Poly’s Upper School Library on the inextricable links between climate change and worsening global health. The conversation wasn’t just about large-scale abstractions, like world maps of temperature change and disease spread; Dr. Sayeed brought his presentation to the cellular level, explaining the ways in which individual human bodies are overburdened by oppressive heat and malnutrition.
Not everyone is forced to adapt to the changing climate, however. Americans and many Europeans enjoy the material products of mass-production, which worsens climate change; air-condition their homes and offices during ever-warmer summers; and live nearby to medical services if they were ever to suffer a climate-related ailment. Rather, it is the seamstresses in Bangladesh who make their garments during 104-degree days whose bodies must adapt to climbing temperatures; when they can no longer adapt, they succumb to dangerous heat stroke. When Cyclone Freddy struck in 2023, it was children in Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique who had to adapt to extreme food scarcity and battle through cholera infections. As Dengue fever spreads during the coming decades due to rising temperatures and floods expanding the habitat of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, it will not be the children of wealthy nations who contract the disease, but those of Central America and Mexico.
Dr. Sayeed emphasized that these inequities don’t stop with the ailments themselves: the ghost of colonialism also haunts medical aid efforts in less-resourced countries. Instead of listening to the needs and expertise of local medical professionals, wealthy countries providing aid (like the United States) tend to give the aid that they believe is necessary based on their own assessments. As a result, aid is often disproprortionately allocated: Dr. Sayeed gave the example of medical centers in which American funding has been used to create modern, fully-equipped AIDS clinics while patients routinely die from kidney failure in the same complex.
In a world in which the United States and western Europe are simultaneously some of the greatest perpetrators of climate change and some of the greatest donors of funding and medical personnel to countries affected by climate change, progress must start where the effects are felt the sharpest. While the ultimate goal should be to mitigate our climate impact, short-term solutions must be found to reduce deaths caused by climate change right now. This can only be achieved by learning from the expertise of doctors in the most affected areas, who are best attuned to the needs of their patients and their regions in the face of environmental disaster.
