Jeremy Hess, Rachel Lowe, Muna Al Maslamani, Laura-Lee Boodram, Anna Stewart Ibarra, Judith Wasserheit
With the emergent threat of COVID-19, this report focuses on threatening diseases that are a by-product of climate change and what type of policy measures should be intact to deal with this head-on.
The WISH Unheeded Warnings: Mitigating the Impact of Climate Change on Communicable Diseases report evaluates a range of questions on the topics of climate change, including land use and the emergence of arboviruses in the Amazon, through to climate change and zoonotic diseases, with a focus also on communicable disease and climate change in the Middle East region.
Professor in Emergency Medicine, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, and Global Health, Adjunct Professor in Atmospheric Sciences, and Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGe), University of Washington. Jeremy Hess serves as the director of the UW Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE). He has an MD and an MPH in global environmental health and is residency-trained and board-certified in emergency medicine. He continues to practice emergency medicine at the region’s only level 1 trauma center. His research spans a range of climate and health areas, from assessing harms to developing and evaluating interventions to prepare the health sector. He was the principal investigator of an NIH-funded grant supporting work in India on the epidemiology of extreme heat and strategies for developing, implementing and evaluating heat early-warning systems, and has ongoing work funded by the Wellcome Trust focused on evaluating heat action plans. Jeremy has also consulted for the Climate and Health Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he previously worked as a medical adviser on the health effects of climate change and evidence-based interventions to enhance preparedness and promote climate change adaptation at the state and federal levels. He is on the editorial board of several emergency medicine and environmental health journals and is a recipient of the Presidential GreenGov award. His work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Wellcome Trust, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other funders. He has been a lead author on multiple publications for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the third US National Climate Assessment.
Rachel Lowe is an Associate Professor and the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research involves understanding how environmental and socio-economic factors interact to determine the risk of disease transmission. She leads a group of researchers working between the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases and the Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health. Rachel graduated from the University of East Anglia in 2004 with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Meteorology and Oceanography with a year in Europe. She spent one year at the University of Granada, Spain, reading Environmental Science. In 2007, she completed an MSc with distinction in Geophysical Hazards at University College London (UCL), where she received a UCL Graduate Masters Award. In 2011, she obtained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Exeter. Alongside her PhD, she was a Network Facilitator for the Leverhulme Trust funded project EUROBRISA: a EURO-Brazilian Initiative for improving South American seasonal forecasts. During the project, she collaborated with climate scientists and public health experts in Brazil, which resulted in her continuing participation in the Brazilian Climate and Health Observatory. From 2010-2012, she was a Visiting Scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, where she worked with the Malawi Ministry of Health to develop predictive models for malaria and a platform to integrate climate information and rural telemedicine. From 2012-2016, she was a Postdoctoral Scientist and Head of Climate Services for Health at the Catalan Institute for Climate Sciences (IC3) in Barcelona, Spain. She has worked with the World Health Organization as a temporary advisor on developing decision-making tools for climate and health in Europe. She is a visiting scholar at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).