06 October 2009

Experts Learn to Collaborate as Changing Climate Affects Health

Observations of vegetation, sea temperatures can predict disease outbreaks

A view of Earth from space is presented in this composite image from NASA.

By Cheryl Pellerin
Staff Writer

Washington — Human health ebbs and flows with the seasons, but the current confluence of extreme weather, global climate change and the shifting distribution of disease are driving the need for more active collaboration between climate scientists and public health experts.

Meetings between health and climate experts have been increasing since early 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that Earth’s climate is changing and human activity is affecting that change. (See “Prepare for Health Effects of Climate Change, World Experts Urge.”)

At a 2008 event in Washington, “Changing Climate, Changing Health Patterns: What Will it Take to Predict and Protect,” Conrad Lautenbacher, then-administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Barbara Hatcher, secretary-general of the World Federation of Public Health Associations; and a panel of experts discussed Earth observations and their application to public health.

An important tool for both disciplines, Lautenbacher said, is the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS), an effort that integrates data from the widely distributed Earth-observing networks of land- and sea-based, airborne and space-based monitoring instruments.

The intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations ― a voluntary organization of 73 governments and the European Commission and 52 intergovernmental, international and regional organizations ― coordinates the GEOSS effort, which began in 2003. (See “Benefits Arise from Global Effort To Link Earth Observation Data.”)

EARTH FROM SPACE

The GEOSS network of data providers, panel moderator Leonard Hirsch said during a 2008 State Department webchat, have come together “to develop standards, methodologies and tools to better use the enormous investment countries and localities have made in collecting observations from around the Earth ― everything from satellite-based images and on-the-ground measurements of water flow to biodiversity patterns and health trends.” Hirsch is a senior policy adviser at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

This growing capacity to map and model such measurements, Hatcher said, “enables us to delve much more deeply into the links, pathways and causes of public health concerns, from infectious disease to pollution-related illnesses such as asthma and allergies.”

A strong early warning system prevented disease outbreaks in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after an earthquake and tsunami in 2005.

Since the 1980s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has funded projects that use remotely sensed data to address resource management, land-cover changes, monitoring and early warning systems in countries worldwide. And today, remote-sensing observations of weather, land and ocean parameters can now be used to predict outbreaks or trends in infectious diseases such as meningitis, malaria and cholera.

In 1994, scientist Rita Colwell, while studying environmental influences on cholera, suggested sea-surface temperature and height, and plankton blooms could be remotely sensed and used to forecast outbreaks.

Since 1997, through the U.S. Defense Department’s Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System, NASA scientists have been using satellite observations of vegetation, sea-surface temperatures and more to monitor rainfall conditions in East Africa that are linked with outbreaks of diseases like Rift Valley fever.

Over the next decade, GEOSS will improve such predictions, turn data on the transport of air pollution into early warnings for cardiovascular and respiratory patients, use data on weather and stream flow to better manage drinking water, and integrate knowledge of population distribution, chemical transport and advance hurricane and flood forecasts into emergency management decisions.

MERIT

In 2007, the World Health Organization, GEO and members of the environmental, public health and epidemiological communities established the Meningitis Environmental Risk Information Technologies (MERIT) project. Meningitis is an infection of the meninges, the thin lining that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord.

MERIT combines the knowledge, research findings and expertise of 30 international and regional partners to improve understanding of risk factors — environmental, socioeconomic, demographic, biological and epidemiological — that influence the spread of meningococcal meningitis or trigger outbreaks in Africa’s Meningitis Belt, an area that stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, with an estimated population of 300 million people.

The project extends the ability to combine environmental information with knowledge of epidemic meningitis, according to the Washington-based Health and Climate Foundation. MERIT partners will integrate valuable information into meningitis prevention and control activities by developing risk maps of the current situation and future scenarios based on projected changes in climate, early warning systems and better prevention efforts.

Combining routine epidemic surveillance data with information on historical or current climatic and environmental conditions, for example, may help target vaccination efforts. Existing resources could be dramatically improved through collaboration among national, regional and international institutions to refine research efforts, increase access to data and develop and enhance health-environment networks.

Today, more than 20 activities, studies, research projects and disease-modeling developments are under way within the MERIT framework.

More information about GEOSS is available at the NOAA Web site. More information about MERIT is available at the Health and Climate Foundation Web site.