Health problems related to climate change are getting worse, says two recently published reports by the medical publication Lancet. The reports followed 44 health measures connected to climate change around the world. They include heat deaths, infectious disease and hunger. All of them are getting worse, said Marina Romanello. She is a research director of the Lancet Countdown project. With “the world on track to 2.4C of warming, the cost of inaction on climate and health will vastly outweigh the costs of acting now,” the report says. This year’s reports are called “code red for a healthy future.” One report is centered on the United States and one is centered on the entire world. The reports found some dangerous trends: At-risk populations like older people and the very young spent more time in extreme heat. For people over 65, the researchers found they were exposed to extreme heat at a higher rate than the average from 1986 to 2005. More people also lived in warm places where it is easier for some diseases, like cholera or dengue, to spread. Coastlines are warm enough for the dangerous Vibrio bacteria to grow in the Baltic areas of Europe and the Northeast and Pacific Northwest of the U.S. In some poorer nations, the season for malaria-spreading mosquitoes has gotten longer since the 1950s. The research also found that 72 percent of countries saw an increase in exposure to wildfires. And in 2020, up to 19 percent of the world’s land surface was affected by extreme drought
