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Public health must grow greener

UK public health campaigners have welcomed the historic agreement struck at the Earth Summit pledging clean water and sanitation for millions of people – but have raised doubts over its fulfilment.

And both public health experts and development campaigners condemned the Johannesburg meeting’s failure to take seriously worldwide poverty and environmental threats.

Ian MacArthur, chief executive of the UK Public Health Alliance, described the summit’s target of halving the numbers of people without access to clean water and proper sanitation by 2015 as ‘excellent’.

More than one billion people around the world currently lack access to clean drinking water, and another billion lack access to proper sanitation. Denial of these basic amenities causes more than three quarters of diseases, according to the United Nations, including the deaths of more than seven million children a year from diarrhoeal diseases like cholera and dysentery. The summit committed member countries to investing money and technical expertise in achieving its goals.

Mr MacArthur stressed that the success of developed countries – including the UK – to commit sufficient aid to on-the-ground projects over the coming years would be the ‘acid test’ of the summit’s decision. None of the summit’s agreements were binding or enforceable in a court of law, he pointed out.

In other areas the summit had achieved little, he said. He believed ‘mega-summits’ had ‘limited value’ in tackling world environmental and poverty problems.

Mr MacArthur, who took over the helm of the troubled UKPHA six months ago, is keen to point up the links and parallels between public health and green concerns. He hopes to bring public health issues to a wider audience by hooking into environmental and sustainable development campaigns. Already, he pointed out, the UK was experiencing ‘tell tale’ signs of global warning which could bring health risks. Mr MacArthur, who is due to spell out his ‘ecological model’ of public health at a conference in Liverpool in October, stressed that equity was at the heart of both public health and sustainable development agendas.

The UK-based charity Oxfam and the campaign Greenpeace both condemned the Earth Summit’s lack of substantial progress. The few gains on sanitation and environmental issues were ‘crumbs to the poor’, said Andrew Hewett of Oxfam International. While paying lip service to the poor and sustainable development most countries had ‘let the world down’.

Greenpeace said the summit had failed, in the face of the fossil fuel and nuclear industry lobbies, to set targets for increasing clean sustainable energy needed to fight climate change and tackle poverty.

Stark figures detailing how climate change may affect health in the UK were revealed in a report published by the Department of Health in August. While warmer winters could cut excess deaths from cold by 20,000 a year by 2050, there could be 2,800 annual deaths due to warmer summers and 10,000 annually from food poisoning, as well as deaths caused by flooding, malaria, skin cancer and severe winter gales. The report, Health Effects of Climate, produced by the UK’s Expert Group on Climate Change and Health, calls for more research on the potential threats ‘as a matter of urgency’.