(Press-News.org) From heat waves to damaged crops to asthma in children, climate change is a major public health concern, argues a Michigan State University researcher in a new study.
Climate change is about more than melting ice caps and images of the Earth on fire, said Sean Valles, assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy, who believes bioethicists could help reframe current climate change discourse.
"When we talk about climate change, we can't just be talking about money and jobs and polar bears," he said. "Why do we focus on polar bears? Why not kids? Climate change isn't just people hurting polar bears. It's people hurting people."
The public has become fairly apathetic to climate change, he said. But moving away from "save the environment" messaging could help people focus on the serious health risks of climate change, even if they're skeptical.
A prime example: antibiotic resistance.
People understand "superbugs" are dangerous, thanks in part to bioethicists' efforts, Valles said. Working in interdisciplinary teams and contributing to policy discussions, bioethicists have helped to successfully communicate the dangers of "superbugs," which have evolved to resist penicillin and other antibiotics.
The same thing could happen with climate change if bioethicists have a seat at the table. They could aid communication efforts by doing what bioethicists do best: public advocacy and interdisciplinary collaboration, he said. And they're experts in the analysis and communication of medical risk.
In addition, ethics will increasingly come into play as the climate change debate continues. Bioethicists could help mitigate tensions between skeptics and experts when dealing with complex socioeconomic issues, as they relate to climate change.
"It would be a major victory if slightly more often people would talk about the health effects, or at least try to imagine, the health-related risks involved with climate change," Valles said. "There are some important justice issues at stake because the most vulnerable populations will feel the effects of climate change first."
The study is published in the June edition of the journal Bioethics.
INFORMATION:
The National Hurricane Center is keeping a close eye on a developing tropical low pressure area in the south-central Gulf of Mexico. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided imagery of the system, and an animation was created at NASA showing the development over two days. The system has a high chance for development into a tropical depression.
NOAA's GOES-East satellite sits in a fixed location providing continuous coverage of weather systems in the eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean basin. An animation of visible and infrared imagery of the low was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES ...
An international research team has found a way of protecting sensitive catalysts from oxygen-caused damage. In the future, this could facilitate the creation of hydrogen fuel cells with molecular catalysts or with biomolecules such as the hydrogenase enzyme. To date, this could only be accomplished using the rare and expensive precious metal platinum. Together with their French colleagues, researchers from Bochum and Mülheim describe the way in which a hydrogel can serve as a "protective shield" for biomolecules by two articles written in the journals Angewandte Chemie ...
The stress and worry of giving birth prematurely does not adversely affect a mother's parenting behaviour, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.
Preterm children often require special care in the neonatal period including incubator care or assistance with breathing. Previous research has suggested that this stress, separation and an increased tendency for depression may impair a mother's parenting behaviour and adversely affect preterm childrens' long term development.
However, a new paper from the University of Warwick shows that mothers of preterm ...
WASHINGTON, June 15, 2015 -- It's been around for decades and it's probably in your diet soda - for a little while longer anyway. PepsiCo announced recently it was removing the artificial sweetener aspartame from its Diet Pepsi products in the U.S. starting in August. The company cited consumer concerns about the chemical's safety. So this week, Reactions answers the question, "Is aspartame safe?" Check it out here: https://youtu.be/92r1oOul0kM.
INFORMATION:Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to ...
HOUSTON -- (June 15, 2015) -- A team of biologists from Rice University, the University of Notre Dame and three other schools has discovered that an agricultural pest that began plaguing U.S. apple growers in the 1850s likely did so after undergoing extensive and genome-wide changes in a single generation.
This new result, which appears online this week in Ecology Letters, came from applying the latest tools of genome sequencing and analysis to preserved evidence from experiments carried out at Notre Dame in the 1990s. The research focuses on the fruit fly Rhagoletis ...
DENVER, June 15 -- A new study from the University of Colorado Denver finds that scientists agree that children of same-sex parents experience 'no difference' on a range of social and behavioral outcomes compared to children of heterosexual or single parents.
The study was led by Jimi Adams, an associate professor in the Department of Health and Behavioral Studies at CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and published this month in Social Science Research.
The research comes at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is determining whether the Constitution requires ...
Bethesda, MD (June 15, 2015) -- Modifying the small white blood cells that protect against disease might help treat immune disorders, according to a study1 published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the basic science journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Specifically, researchers found that modulation of B lymphocyte function may be a means of regulating T lymphocyte function to treat immune-mediated disorders, including inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).
Researchers uncovered the following pathway: gut bacteria stimulate intestinal ...
This news release is available in German. An innovative mechanism that the innate immune system uses to control viral infections has been uncovered by researchers at the University Medical Centers in Mainz and Freiburg. Central to this is the discovery that two different but related elements of the immune system can act together in concert to fight, for example, rotavirus infections. Infection with rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea in children around the world. The results of the research have recently been published in the eminent scientific journal Nature ...
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Aging can cause many changes to the body, including obesity and a loss of lean mass. Now, a group of University of Florida Health researchers has discovered that an existing drug reduces body fat and appetite in older rats, which has intriguing implications for aging humans.
Rapamycin, a pharmaceutical used to coat coronary stents and prevent transplant rejection, reduces obesity and preserves lean body mass when given intermittently to older rats. The two rapamycin-related studies were published recently in the Journal of Gerontology as a joint effort ...
A simple way to turn carbon nanotubes into valuable graphene nanoribbons may be to grind them, according to research led by Rice University.
The trick, said Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, is to mix two types of chemically modified nanotubes. When they come into contact during grinding, they react and unzip, a process that until now has depended largely on reactions in harsh chemical solutions.
The research by Ajayan and his international collaborators appears in Nature Communications.
To be clear, Ajayan said, the new process is still a chemical reaction ...
