Changing Times, Changing Planet: Understanding How Both Affect Health Care

So, you know, healthcare is like many other things that change something, and it can have unintended consequences somewhere else. And we're certainly in a remarkable time of change right now at so many levels. Our socioeconomic, political systems are all under change. Our technology is undergoing change. The whole nature of what people's expectations are, demographics are changing. I mean, we can say change is the only constant. How does that relate to the burden of health care? And how does that relate to our economy? Are they interrelated? And does that connect at all into environmental global health? Oh, boy, these are big questions, big issues, and big, big decisions to be made. And so I was very intrigued when I read the JAMA just recently in the March 22 issue of 2018. This is news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A little snippet. And what did they say? They say that an infectious disease outbreak in Southeast Asia could cost the US economy up to $40 billion and put almost 1.4 million jobs at risk because of people in Asia being sick enough that they would not have the need for goods and services that we're selling into that economy. Meaning our economy is globally interconnected. It's interconnected through health and vitality of the world population. And a lot of our institutions and our business delivery systems, our infrastructure and kind of value chains are built around these global interconnections. And so when I went on to read this, it said that in 2019, the proposed CDC budget in the new President Trump budget proposal would cut the CDC budget for the funding for these kinds of global health research studies to $59 million when the funding had previously been at $180 million. And that just for instance, the Ebola outbreak alone in Africa and the transference of that over into risk in the United States caused a special needs allocation of about $600 million. And so the many experts in the field are now saying that this is very alarming because it then poses that the US Will lose extraordinarily important vital information about epidemic threats and not get kind of feet on the ground and get a head start on these things before they start to get into a place where not only it jeopardizes millions of people's health, but but billions of dollars of our economy because our health is interconnected to our economy, which is interconnected to our country's, I guess you call it financial health. So these are the interrelationships. And then I turn to an issue of Science magazine with this brilliant kind of guidance document around planetary boundaries, guiding human development on a changing Planet is the title of this multiple, authored by a variety of leaders in environmental and global health. And they break down environmental changes into subcategories, all of which map against alterations in human health. This includes climate change. This includes toxins going into the environment. This includes ozone depletion. This includes atmospheric aerosol pollution, these small particulate materials that can be absorbed directly into our blood and into our brains. It includes ocean acidification. It includes fresh water use and depletion of freshwater reserves, particularly many of our aquifers that are being lost. It involves land use, changes in which we're losing arable soil, and then lastly, biodiversity and loss of biodiversity. Each one of those particular areas of global environmental change maps against different kinds of human diseases, not just infectious in parasites, parasitic diseases, but also chronic diseases, as it changes global temperature, or as it changes freshwater purity, or as it changes availability for arable lands, or as it changes toxin exposure and its influence as persistent organic pollutants on hormones and producing xenohormones. So all of these things are interrelated very, very tightly into what ultimately affects our economy, affects the ability of nations, and affects right on down to individual patient sitting in the waiting room of a doc with a chronic illness. So I think we need to keep our perspective broad. We need to recognize that we're interconnected. We need to recognize concepts of unintended consequences. This is the butterfly's wing in China, changing the weather in North America. All of these things are extraordinarily important for our consideration as we're bringing up the children of our children to be the stewards of the planet moving forward.