Climate Change and Global Health

16 November 2009

Professor Tony McMichael and Professor John Mackenzie

Climate change raises a number of challenges to human wellbeing, among these is the threat to our health. In combination with climate change, large-scale global environmental changes such as loss of biodiversity, changes in fresh water supplies and stresses on food production systems, have the potential to cause systemic adverse alterations in patterns of health and disease. These can combine with many other specific challenges, including the emergence of new infectious diseases and the re-emergence and re-distribution of old infectious foes (such as tuberculosis and malaria). While, early on, the effects of these health changes are likely to be most severe in the developing world, they pose health threats to all of us. This lecture evaluated the impact, and significance, of these health threats and the strategies being adopted to avert and contain them.

Broad Topics: Medicine and Life Science

Sub-topics: Environment, Medical & Health Science

Areas: ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment

Professor McMichael is a National Health and Medical Research Council Australia Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. He has been an advisor and consultant on environmental health and climate change issues to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the UN Environment Program, the World Bank and other international bodies. His pioneering research and writing on the health risks of climate change, in the 1990s, was combined with his central role in health risk assessment for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The research program on climate change health that he heads is now one of the largest and most internationally active in the world.

Professor John Mackenzie is a scientist with an outstanding international reputation in the field of microbiology and its impacts on public health. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 2002 for service to microbiology research, as a leading contributor to the understanding of the genetics, pathogenesis and public health implications of viruses, and to education. He led the WHO mission into China seeking information on SARS in 2003 and was involved in the global response to Avian Flu in 2004.

This lecture was part of the ANU Public Lecture Series 2009, presented by The National Centre for Biosecurity and The John Curtin Medical School.