Children’s Vulnerability to Environmental Exposures: Current Global Burden

Shidonna Raven
1 hour ago
2 min read

Oct 14m 2010

Source: NIH

National Library of Medicine

National Center for Biotechnology Information

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Current global burden of climate-related disease on children

Approximately one in five deaths around the world each year occurs in a child < 5 years of age (WHO 2008). Lower respiratory tract infections, diarrhea, and malaria are responsible for > 50% of childhood deaths (Prüss-Üstün and Corvalan 2007). All three of these disease categories could worsen with climate change. Diarrheal disease is primarily attributable to environmental factors, specifically contaminated food and drinking water (WHO 2008), and is affected by changing temperature and precipitation events (Campbell-Lendrum and Woodruff 2006). Thirty-five percent of excess child mortality is secondary to malnutrition (Black et al. 2008), a risk factor also expected to worsen with climate change because of increasing food insecurity (McMichael 2001b). Micronutrient deficiencies, common with malnutrition, can exacerbate infectious disease morbidity (Bhutta et al. 2008).

The WHO estimates global burden of disease using the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) metric that includes morbidity as well as mortality and provides a composite picture of health impacts caused by diverse risk factors (Kovats et al. 2005). According to WHO estimates using the DALY metric, > 88% of the existing burden of disease due to climate change occurs in children < 5 years of age in both developed and developing countries (Zhang et al. 2007). This estimate is markedly higher than the pediatric proportion of the total burden of disease, which for children < 5 years of age is 5% in high-income countries and 31% in low- and medium-income countries (WHO 2008). Zhang et al. (2007) argue that DALYs are important when assessing climate change impacts to establish priorities and to evaluate the efficiency of environmental policies. Figures 1 and 2 show, respectively, the annual deaths attributable to climate change for four significant disease categories and the climate-related DALYs lost among different age groups. Children suffer a much greater burden of climate-related disease than do adults (WHO 2002a, 2008). Furthermore, the impacts of climate change on children are not evenly distributed globally, but instead occur in parts of the world already experiencing a higher relative disease burden, namely, in low-income countries (Haines et al. 2006).