No time to waste

EU efforts to tackle the impact of climate change on public health must not wait for scientific proof before acting, warns Frédérique Ries

In its 60th year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is tackling one of the major issues of our time: climate change. The link between health and the environment may not at first be clear, but in fact global warming and all it entails is a real threat to human health.

Both the WHO and the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have highlighted the impacts of climate change on public health. And the list is long, with millions of people expected to be affected by heat-related illnesses, malnutrition, diarrhoeal diseases, cardiovascular and respiratory disorders and infectious or vector-borne diseases, as well as indirectly from injury and stress due to natural disasters.

As rapporteur on the European environment and health action plan (2004-2010) I can confirm that climate change has become a top priority, including issues such as air quality, the impact on health of hazardous substances or indoor pollution. For example, in the draft resolution on the mid-term review of this action plan, I call for “enhanced cooperation between the WHO, the member states’ monitoring authorities, the commission and the European centre for disease prevention and control in order to bolster the early-warning system and thus to curb the harmful effects which climate change has on health”.

This cooperation between relevant institutions is crucial and will only be really efficient once the EU has given itself the proper means to go forward. I’m convinced that through this action plan, or at the latest by 2010, there will be benefits flowing from the extension of  actions on the negative impacts of climate change on human health, through the elaboration of effective adaptation measures at community level. This should be done in a consistent and coherent manner through systematic public education and awareness-raising programmes, an integration of climate change adaptation measures into public health strategies and programmes, a health-related early warning system and coordination between existing environmental data monitoring networks and disease outbreak networks.

But dealing with environmental health should not simply be limited to the climate change challenge. My report (which is due to be adopted in committee on 6 May) clearly focuses on three other critical areas. First, the precautionary principle. I simply note that this safety principle is often proclaimed but rarely applied at EU level. With the well-known exception of the ban imposed by parliament and council in June 2005 on the use in children’s toys of six substances belonging to the phthalate family, the precautionary principle has not been applied in recent community legislation. This is why I propose a thorough revision of the 2 February 2000 communication in order to invigorate the precautionary principle and to simplify the procedure.

Second, habitat pollution. I was very surprised to learn from a report by an expert at the London school of hygiene that, for example, in the city of Prague the air inside people’s houses was more polluted than the outside air. The commission would therefore be well advised to publish a green paper on the specific problems of habitat pollution and to keep in mind that we spend an average of 90 per cent of our time in a confined space.

Third, electromagnetic fields. Sometimes technical progress can – if it is poorly mastered – present certain health risks. This is exactly what could happen in the case of electromagnetic waves. The exposure limits for the general public date from 1999 and have not kept pace with developments in technology such as local high-output wireless networks, WIFI or WIMAX. This is why I strongly support the introduction of more effective protection of the general public by reducing the exposure thresholds. It has to be done on the basis of the bio-initiative report, which summarises over 1500 high-level academic studies concerned with the negative effects that electromagnetic fields have on human health.

I strongly believe that an approach that makes absolute scientific evidence the paradigm for the 21st century clearly goes against common sense. That is one excellent reason to share the views of Mario Molina, winner of the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry. Speaking in favour of compliance with the Kyoto protocol on curbing climate change, he said that “we don’t need scientific certainty in order to take action”. And more coherent action is precisely what the EU needs in the fields of environment and health.