Grist has launched a new, year-long series examining the impact of a warming planet on human health. The project, Vital Signs, will include reporting from five continents, and will furnish readers with a clear understanding of how rising temperatures, drought, wildfire smoke, and other consequences of climate change affect the human body.
The series is being led by senior staff reporter Zoya Teirstein, who kicked off the project earlier this month with an in-depth look at Valley Fever — a fungal disease endemic to the American West that is getting worse thanks to the region’s rapid development and whiplashing periods of intense rain and drought. The story was co-published with local outlet Arizona Luminaria. The valley fever story also includes an information guide about the disease, and both the story and fact sheet are available to republish for free.Â
“Through its ambitious journalism, Grist strives to connect the climate crisis to everyday lives,” said editor-in-chief Katherine Bagley. “There is nothing more personal than a warming planet’s impact on our own well-being.”
This reporting initiative is possible thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust. Each story in the series will have a local partner to help reach audiences directly impacted by these health risks. And all stories will be available to republish.
As part of this series, Grist is launching an alert for readers to receive these stories, and other critical reporting on climate and health, as soon as they’re published. Sign up here to get Grist’s latest health stories in your inbox.
The project highlights a troubling phenomenon: For millennia, carriers of disease like mosquitoes, ticks, fungi, and algae have been constrained, often seasonally, by temperature and moisture. Epidemics of malaria eased as autumn turned to winter. Ticks went dormant under layers of snow. Parasite-laden flies disappeared with the first rains. Generations of conventional wisdom are predicated on these patterns: tribes in the Arctic know to avoid toxic shellfish poisoning by harvesting clams in cold months. New Englanders check for ticks in the summer. Villagers in the East African highlands only sleep under mosquito netting in the hottest parts of the year.
But in every corner of the globe, from the desert in the American southwest to the Kenyan mountains to the fringes of the Baltic Sea, climate change is scrambling that calculus. Even minute changes — a high heat index here, a spike in average water temperatures there — allow health threats both common and rare to slip through public health systems designed for a world with a different climate. Every step into the hottest century humanity has ever known cracks the lid of Pandora’s box a little wider. Grist’s new series will explore these threats and what scientists, researchers, doctors, and everyday people are doing to combat them.
“For far too long, health has been an afterthought in the conversation around climate change,” said Teirstein. “This series is the first journalistic endeavour to explore the tangible effects of rising temperatures on our health in depth, with the aim of arming you with the tools you need to understand these threats and keep yourself safe.”
