Hot or Not?: Recognizing and Managing the Health Impacts of Climate Change

Sabrina McCormick, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

Climate change is already detrimentally affecting the lives and health of many people (Houghton et al. 2001) and is resulting in 160,000 annual deaths globally, caused by vector borne diseases, food insecurity, and heatwaves, (Campbell-Lendrum 2003). This paper presents an analytical framework for the newly recognized and socially-contested category of “climate-induced illnesses.” In it, I aim to first, expand the range of disaster research and theory by examining health crises as a ‘new species of trouble’ and by applying the insights of disaster research to population health (Erikson 1992). Second, I attempt to make contributions to medical sociology by exploring how the social construction and framing of illness functions for illnesses identified as climate-induced. I examine three illnesses recently recognized as exacerbated by climate change: West Nile Virus in the Northeast United States, increasing toxicological exposures in coastal Alaska Native communities, and heat-induced illnesses in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Tenenbaum 2005; Balbus and Wilson 2000; Ebi 2007). I argue that there are institutional obstacles to illness crisis management reflected in competing illness paradigms. Responses on the part of affected communities, medical practitioners, and governmental representatives interact to form socially shared public etiological and epidemiological understandings that shape subsequent prevention methods. This research presents an opportunity to apply multiple sociological theories to the pressing subject of climate change, with special focus on its impacts.