Heat can be deadly, killing more people each year than other weather hazards. But as warmer days become our new normal — or, as some climatologists put it, our “new abnormal” — the damaging effects of higher temperatures on our bodies may linger much longer than you might think.
The World Health Organization says climate change is “the greatest health threat facing humanity”. And while that may sound like hyperbole, experts say it’s really not that far-fetched.
“There are really direct relationships between climate and health, and what we see in many cases, we could call ‘climate-exacerbated disease,'” Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, director of emergency preparedness for emergency medicine at Columbia University, told Yahoo News.
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Why extreme heat is bad for your health right now
Walking outside on a sweltering day, it’s easy to see how immediate damage excessive heat can cause. Heatstroke and heat exhaustion may be among the first conditions that come to mind. Heatstroke, which occurs when the body loses its ability to cool itself and control its temperature, can lead to permanent disability and even death, with body temperature reaching 106°F or higher in less than 15 minutes. Heat exhaustion, which includes symptoms like dizziness, nausea, and headaches, can lead to heat stroke if not treated immediately.
But extreme heat can also be damaging in less obvious ways and can have a major impact on chronic disease.
“Heat puts stress on your body, and when your body is stressed, it struggles to cope with other things like heart or respiratory issues,” Tedeschi said. “When you look at, for example, emergency room visits during times of extreme heat, more people are having heart attacks, more people are having strokes, and that’s frankly just a reflection of the stress on the body.”
Higher temperatures often lead to poorer air quality, with extreme heat and stagnant air increasing the amount of ozone and particulate pollution. And after enduring a scorching heat, all that heat can also interfere with your sleep, even mild heat exposure keeps body temperature elevated, affects sleep stages, and hampers the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.
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How High Temperatures Harm Your Long-Term Health
“On an individual level, I think it’s about this heat stress for a good period of time,” Tedeschi said. “If you’re continually exposed to extreme heat or high temperatures that your body can’t handle, I think that’s frankly putting you at risk that your body might otherwise fend off.”
There are also more downstream effects. Wildfire smoke — which has become an all-too-familiar problem across much of the United States as fires continue to smolder in Canada and California — has adverse health consequences when these dangerous gases and fine particles are inhaled, and the impact of poor air quality caused by the smoke can also be detrimental in the long term.
“There are probably longer-term effects of these small particles that we don’t fully understand yet,” Tedeschi said. “They go deep into the lungs, they probably cause more inflammation and may be responsible for more chronic disease. Coupled with heat, it’s a really dangerous combination.
Heat and drought – which have been linked to climate change – are also prime conditions for a more intense wildfire season, and are expected to worsen as our planet heats up, with Canada’s natural resources agency saying climate change could double the amount of area burned each year by the end of this century.
“I’m thinking of children who are chronically exposed to poor air quality, and that’s absolutely a chronic asthma risk,” Tedeschi said. “If you look at asthma rates and look at the heat index and access to green space, there’s a lot of correlation. And so I am concerned that children, for example, are exposed to poor air quality in such a way that they develop respiratory problems or that the ones they already have, during their lifetime, may get worse.
Those milder winters and earlier springs that allow for a ripe wildfire season also give disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes and ticks the chance to thrive longer and expand their habitats into new, warmer corners of the United States.
And that’s not all that’s booming as temperatures rise. The emergence of new, sometimes deadly, fungi capable of infecting humans is now a major concern for the World Health Organization. Dr. Andrej Spec, an expert in fungal infections at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told Yahoo News: “When we warm up, we lose one of our greatest defenses against fungus: our body temperature.
Mushrooms, Spec explained, don’t do well at 98.6°F — the average human body temperature — and grow best at temperatures around 77°. But more and more cases of extreme heat are eliminating fungi that can only survive in a temperate environment and allowing more heat-resistant fungi to thrive.
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The myriad health issues stemming from the increasingly extreme heat will also exacerbate another separate issue that has been decried by doctors and health professionals for years — the shortage of health care workers.
“Across the country, our emergency departments are overwhelmed, overloaded and overcrowded,” Tedeschi said. “And when you think of an event that could land a lot of excess people in the emergency room, like a heat wave or poor air quality event, overcrowding in our ERs is probably one of our biggest risks when it comes to mitigating these climate disasters.