Remember the fierce urgency of NOW
Posted on : February 16, 2009
Author : Larry Brilliant
For many, climate change is already here, the farmer in Andhra whose salted parched lands is yielding half the food it previously did, the Bangladeshi whose island home is under water, the family in Moradabad struggling with malaria...
I was thrilled when I went to the Presidential Inaugural and heard President Obama quote Martin Luther King when he spoke of the 'fierce urgency of NOW'. We cannot wait, we cannot pause, and we cannot delay.
I want to talk about the likelihood that climate change has poised in front of the world pandemics and unprecedented new communicable diseases larger in size, variety, and scale. We have only a small window to act to stop these diseases.
At present, there are 40 communicable diseases. Let me choose just four: smallpox, polio, malaria and lump the rest with bird flu.
The campaign to eradicate smallpox took $150 million in 1967 and required the participation of 150 000 people; and because of its eradication, millions of lives were saved and we don't have to deal with it today.
At present, we are fighting to eradicate polio in India. The global polio eradication programme began in 1988 and, within 10 years, we had conquered 99% of it. But if the temperature rises by 1 °C, the sea level rises by only a few metres, and we have climate refugees, then polio and other waterborne diseases will leap out the pages of history into the front page of the newspaper.
Eradicating polio is part of the fierce urgency of now.
And what if we lose against polio? Surely then we cannot win against the most important battle - malaria.
A million children die every year from malaria in Africa alone, and double of that in the world. It is estimated that six out of the 8 Millennium Development Goals can only be reached with effective malarial control.
If the midpoint of the IPCC estimates for increased temperature and rise in sea level prove accurate, I am sure that within 10 years we will see malaria in the south of France, and in Hollywood.
Lastly, I want to talk about all the other emerging communicable diseases - bird flu, SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome), Ebola, Lassa fever, chiekeungunya, Rift Valley, West Nile, and Marburg. There are many more similar viruses - a dozen, maybe even a hundred. Any or most of these could be the perfect pathogen waiting for the right climate.
We can see this disaster from one or another new viruses coming. And when it happens, no planes will fly, the global economy will be hit with trillions of dollars in losses. And even worse, millions will die. Let us not fail to honour the fierce urgency of now while there is still time, before we have to explain to our children and grandchildren how it became the epidemic tragedy of then.
I was thrilled when I went to the Presidential Inaugural and heard President Obama quote Martin Luther King when he spoke of the 'fierce urgency of NOW'. We cannot wait, we cannot pause, and we cannot delay.
I want to talk about the likelihood that climate change has poised in front of the world pandemics and unprecedented new communicable diseases larger in size, variety, and scale. We have only a small window to act to stop these diseases.
At present, there are 40 communicable diseases. Let me choose just four: smallpox, polio, malaria and lump the rest with bird flu.
The campaign to eradicate smallpox took $150 million in 1967 and required the participation of 150 000 people; and because of its eradication, millions of lives were saved and we don't have to deal with it today.
At present, we are fighting to eradicate polio in India. The global polio eradication programme began in 1988 and, within 10 years, we had conquered 99% of it. But if the temperature rises by 1 °C, the sea level rises by only a few metres, and we have climate refugees, then polio and other waterborne diseases will leap out the pages of history into the front page of the newspaper.
Eradicating polio is part of the fierce urgency of now.
And what if we lose against polio? Surely then we cannot win against the most important battle - malaria.
A million children die every year from malaria in Africa alone, and double of that in the world. It is estimated that six out of the 8 Millennium Development Goals can only be reached with effective malarial control.
If the midpoint of the IPCC estimates for increased temperature and rise in sea level prove accurate, I am sure that within 10 years we will see malaria in the south of France, and in Hollywood.
Lastly, I want to talk about all the other emerging communicable diseases - bird flu, SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome), Ebola, Lassa fever, chiekeungunya, Rift Valley, West Nile, and Marburg. There are many more similar viruses - a dozen, maybe even a hundred. Any or most of these could be the perfect pathogen waiting for the right climate.
We can see this disaster from one or another new viruses coming. And when it happens, no planes will fly, the global economy will be hit with trillions of dollars in losses. And even worse, millions will die. Let us not fail to honour the fierce urgency of now while there is still time, before we have to explain to our children and grandchildren how it became the epidemic tragedy of then.
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