The Mystery of the WHO: The Report Didn’t Bark
As Sherlock Homes’s fans will remember, "Silver Blaze" turns on the mystery of the stable dog that failed to bark when the horse was abducted. In much the same way, the WHO has just issued its annual report on the world’s health showing that, despite the dire predictions of global disaster from warming, all is more than well with the world.
Its 1998 World Health Report, "Life in the 21st Century," gave the globe an "A" for progress. Not only did the WHO show that remarkable advances have been made in increasing life spans, decreasing disease and suffering, and improving health for virtually all age groups, but that the future looks even rosier. To quote the Executive Summary: "As the new millennium approaches, the global population has never had a healthier outlook."
How can this be? After all, the White House tells us the next century promises to be one of rising temperatures, spreading disease, and increasing mortality. Somehow, the WHO didn’t get the word.
The only significant growing threat to human health is HIV/AIDS, a disease that has nothing to do with climate. Indeed, we have made substantial progress made in controlling many major infectious diseases. By 1980, for example, smallpox had been eradicated; yaws had virtually disappeared – and except to medical students, even the name of this tropical skin disease in unfamiliar. As a result of antibiotics and insecticides, the threat of plague has declined; improvements in sanitation and hygiene have made outbreaks of relapsing fever rare. Unbelievably, for those who remember summers of fear and polio insurance, poliomyelitis is scheduled for eradication by the year 2000.
A Look to the Future
Looking to the future, the report identifies three global trends affecting health – none of is global warming. One is economic: the WHO reported on the "unparalleled prosperity" between 1950 and 1973, which resulted in marked improvements in health and life expectancies. The organization identifies the years since 1993 as another era of economic "recovery," which has once again contributed to reduced mortality. The other trends singled out as having significant health effects are population growth and social developments, particularly urbanization.
Over the last 40 years, the growth in the world’s economy has brought about a doubling of the world’s food supply while the number of human mouths has grown much more slowly. This has led to a decline in the proportion of people who are undernourished.
Since 1970, literacy rates have increased by more than 50 percent. Physical wellbeing has also grown apace. More people have access to clean water, sanitation facilities, and minimum health care than ever before.
Past Prognostications
Like the 1998 review, prior World Health Reports have largely ignored global warming as a significant threat to the health and wellbeing of the globe’s population. And rightly so.
Of the 50 million plus deaths in 1997, about one-third stemmed from infectious and parasitic diseases, most of which have nothing to do with climate. The remaining deaths were from such killers as cancer, circulatory diseases, and prenatal conditions, none of which would be aggrevated by a warmer world. Most infectious and parasitic diseases have nothing to do with climate.
The WHO has identified AIDS, one of the most devastating afflictions, as a growing menace in Africa; but it has no relationship to climate. Only insect-spread diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, and diseases like cholera and typhoid that are spread through contaminated water could be worsened by climate change. And then only if swampy polluted areas were allowed to expand without thought to sanitation, window screens, and other precautions that have all but eradicated these diseases in the northern latitudes.
But bear these statistics in mind: In the developed world, as recently as 1985, infectious and parasitic diseases accounted for 5 percent of all deaths; in the most recent year, 1997, they caused only one percent of all deaths. In short, even for such insect-spread diseases as malaria, climate is much less important than affluence.
Singapore, located 2 degrees from the equator, is free of that dreadful malady, while the mosquito-carried scourge is endemic in rural areas of Malaysia, only a few hundred miles away. Singapore’s healthy state stems from good sanitary practices that reduce exposure. The wealth of the island state allows it to maintain an effective mosquito abatement program. As noted in previous columns, malaria and cholera were both major health problems in the United States in the nineteenth century.
Prior to the 1950s, malaria was endemic in the southern portions of America. Malaria was also widespread in southern Europe until shortly after World War II when insecticides and good health practices eliminated it. As the epidemiologists stated in last November’s Science magazine, in the event of climate change, public health measures in the industrialized countries of the world would prevent the spread of such diseases.
Kyoto Kills!
The improvements in health and life expectancies identified by the World Health Organization have brought great benefits to the human race. What led to this remarkable improvement in health?
Greater use of ever cheaper energy and, of course, higher incomes. The Kyoto Protocol threatens both those sources of human gains. Higher incomes, coupled with falling energy prices, have produced the greatest improvements in the wellbeing of men and women in all of history. Where incomes are high, so is life expectancy. Where incomes are low, disease and death are all too prevalent. Economists studying the relationship of income and earnings to mortality have found that the loss of $5 million to $10 million in the US GDP leads to one extra death.
Recently the Energy Information Administration, part of Clinton’s Department of Energy, released its estimates of the cost of meeting the Kyoto targets. According to that agency, which was surely under pressure to minimize its estimate of the burden on the American people, the cost, depending on whether trading were possible and how many emission credits could be purchased abroad, would be between $77 billion and $338 billion annually.
Given the opposition of Europe to trading emission credits across national boundaries, the United States is unlikely to be able to purchase much of its quota in reduced greenhouse gas emissions from overseas. Assuming, therefore, that trading across national boundaries does not take place, the EIA estimates imply that somewhere between 33,800 and 67,000 more Americans will die annually between 2008 and 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol would devastate Third World countries as well. Even if they remain exempt from the limits on CO2 emissions, they will find that the US buys less of their goods and services. Imported goods from the advanced countries will also cost more. As a result, the poor countries will become even poorer. We cannot estimate the toll on those countries –it would vary greatly from country to country – but we know that being poorer will increase their already too high death rate.
What these countries need is higher, not lower, incomes. With greater earnings, their people can look forward to longer life expectancies and reductions in disease. Higher incomes may also reduce violence between and within these states. All in all, the Kyoto treaty is a far more violent killer than any climate changes could be. Let’s arrest it before it kills someone.
References:
The World Health Report 1998, Life in the 21st century — A vision for all, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1998.
Gary Taubes, 1997, "Apocalypse Not," Science (November 7): 10004-6.