The perfect storm according to the World Health Organization is made by climate changes, malnutrition and obesity. The former are, however, those that affect the most health, resulting in scenarios for which we are not fully prepared.
So let's start with the 6 million Italians suffering from related environmental diseases. At the 2022 Summer School of Healthcare Engine in Asiago, experts and scientists discussed analyzes and strategies to deal with the resurgence of pandemics. According to experts, they can recur because they are caused by polluting emissions, uncontrolled mobility, forced anthropization, inadequate policies.
The European continent is grappling with one forced tropicalization that the war and the energy crisis are overshadowing. Politics must find the time to act. The Covid 19, an example of health-environment correlation, in Italy it caused 75 thousand deaths in 2020 and almost 60 thousand in 2021. In the economy it caused the worst recession since the Second World War and only in 2020, according to the Bank of Italy, Italy has lost 8,9% of its GDP. The road to recovery contained in the PNRR is certainly valid today. Even more when he has to juggle "between the war economy and disruptive innovation", as they wrote in the title of the Asiago meeting.
Climate change and health effects: experts predict worsening
“Italy excels in Europe for premature deaths directly due to air pollution with an average of 77.000 deaths per year”, explained Alessandro Miani, president of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine (SIMA). But the environment has impact on the risk of cancer causing another 200 deaths a year. Thousands more deaths are counted by heart attack or coronary events related to exposure to pollutants and environmental factors.
In the workplace, diseases induced by uncontrolled environments and exposure to toxic agents cannot even be registered. Overall it is estimated that approx 6 million Italians are affected by environment-related diseases. And things are bound to get worse, at least until multiple pollution levels are lowered. Without scaring people too much, science says that it is precisely climate change that is favoring phenomena with impacts on health.
The Covid 19 example of disease related to the environment
There are human infectious diseases that are expanding the area of diffusion, but also animal diseases that are becoming habitual in our context. The economy evidently suffers from the hours not worked and the repercussions on the organization of work. The comparison with the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic is the most striking example of these dynamics. Fortunately we had effective vaccines in a very limited time. Their ability to limit the Covid-19, “it has percentages of effectiveness that I don't remember in the history of modern vaccines,” he said Matthew Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the "San Martino" in Genoa.
Risks for students in classrooms
Working and investing in the environment is also a necessity for medicine to reduce human, social and economic costs.
Gianni Rezza, Director General of Health Prevention at the Ministry of Health was asked what awaits us for the future. “There are many candidates for pandemic agents and climate change could facilitate agents transmitted by different vectors or even by another coronavirus".
To counter these phenomena, interventions on the environment will be decisive that surrounds us, protecting the natural one but safeguarding and modifying the anthropic one. It is a first, as synthetic response to the issues posed by Motore Sanità which should also get us moving projects stop. If you think about schools, you know that 30% of school environments are not suitable. Kids are almost as at risk as industrial workers.
They are in the Recovery and Resilience Plan 10 billion for school facilities but it will be necessary to be aware of the lack of spaces and classrooms which today help the spread of even serious pathologies. We need a quality housing design that affects energy savings and wide-ranging environmental impact. Viruses don't go away by themselves.
