Climate Change and Inpatient Dermatology
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HOSPITAL-BASED DERMATOLOGY (L GUGGINA AND C NGUYEN, SECTION EDITORS)
Climate Change and Inpatient Dermatology R. Fathy 1 & Misha Rosenbach 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Purpose of Review Climate change represents a major existential threat facing the global community, and it has already begun to affect human health in a multitude of ways. This review highlights and discusses the implications that climate change has already had and is expected to have for inpatient dermatologists. Recent Findings There are a variety of conditions affected by climate changes. The distribution and frequencies of infectious diseases and their vectors are changing in line with variations in climate conditions. Increased temperatures have already been associated with exacerbation of existing skin conditions, such as atopic dermatitis, and recent evidence suggests that higher temperatures will also magnify the effects of harmful ultraviolet radiation. Extreme weather events that result from climate change are followed by an array of dermatologic conditions that may be unusual for the given location. Inpatient dermatologists should be prepared to manage these potentially unfamiliar dermatologic consequences of climate change. Summary Climate change will have widespread effects on the medical field, and inpatient dermatologists will be faced with their own unique set of challenges and practice variations. Practitioners should be familiar with the ongoing and predicted effects of climate change in their locations so that they can readily identify and treat associated conditions, and they should adjust their practice to reduce their carbon footprint and serve as a model for patients to do the same. Keywords Climate change . Dermatology . Inpatient dermatology
Introduction Climate change is an existential threat and one of the major challenges of our time, with scientists overwhelmingly agreeing that the process is anthropogenic in origin [1], worsening, and requires a rapid response at a global scale. The science of climate change has been clear for 40 years—though in 2019, it achieved “5-sigma” certainty, i.e., the highest level of scientific evidence possible [2]. Most discussions of climate impacts focus on projections looking decades into the future [3], but climate change already has profound impacts on human health. From increasing numbers of extreme weather This article is part of the Topical Collection on Hospital-Based Dermatology * Misha Rosenbach [email protected] 1
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2
Department of Dermatology, University of Pennsylvania, 7th Floor Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, South Pavilion, 3400 Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires to food shortages caused by ecological changes and subsequent privation, migration, and associated mental health impacts, climate change is having profound impacts on people and populations across t
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