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Reprint Of An Interview From Our Archives
“Spaceship Earth”--McMichael’s Vision |
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Author: Roger Bernier MPH, PhD [The following interview of Tony McMichael was carried out by the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia in May 2008. The following is an edited version of the interview with excerpts here selected to help understand McMichael’s vision. The full interview can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/jwyy99j] Interviewer: Tony, I wonder if we could start with a bit of a macro view of the issue…could you just give us a picture of what the problem is that you see emerging.
Prof. McMichael:
Well, I think the basic problem, that you've alluded to already, is
that we really haven't got the full measure of what the
significance, the impacts, of climate change, and indeed the various
other global environment changes of which climate change is just
part of the syndrome. We haven't got the measure of what they really
signify. We've been fretting about the impact on the economy,
disruption of economic activity, loss of jobs in some sectors. We
worry about the threat to tourism, to physical infrastructure, to
iconic species, and those things are all important.
Panel on Climate Change Prof. McMichael: Well, the evidence has been stiffening up over the last decade as slowly an increasing number of epidemiologists and others have begun to engage in this question of how might climate change affect patterns of health and disease around the world. So this time around, this was the fourth five‑year cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the evidence was much broader and much stronger than it had been when I first got involved in the early 1990s when the story was really a new one and, indeed, one that wasn't much on the radar scheme for science at large, it was really the province of just a few marginal epidemiologists, who had a sense that this was going to become an important story. So we're now much more confident that we are beginning to get the measure of the risks to human health, but we also are beginning to realise that in addition to trying to model the ways in which future climate change would affect patterns of disease around the world that in fact it's already beginning to happen in some parts of the world and we've got to work among ourselves as researchers, but work with government, with policy makers, to develop risk lessening strategies, what we call adaptive strategies. Government Response Interviewer: Now clearly governments all around the world are concerned and they need to have a response to these emerging issues. What's your take on what governments are trying to do in terms of preparedness scenarios for the emergence of these particular problems? Prof. McMichael: Well, I should say at the outset that of course the problem is rather wider than infectious diseases. They capture a lot of our attention and we know that they're sensitive to climate. And it includes mundane things like food poisoning, salmonella food poisoning, also very temperature sensitive, and which we would expect to increase, particularly in poorer and more remote parts of this country. But we're also talking about the effect of increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves and extreme weather events. We're talking about the effect of climate change on our fresh water supplies in this country, how that's going to continue to do damage to our rural sector, our food production. We know that the disruption of productive life in some parts of rural Australia is exacerbating mental health problems. There's always the tragedy of suicide lurking in the background as farmers lose livelihoods and families get displaced. So it's a pretty wide spectrum of risks to health that we have to be concerned about. I think it would be fair to say that up until pretty recently our governments in this country and elsewhere have been slow to realise that this is an important part of the story. There's been an undue preoccupation with protecting local economies and not enough recognition that we now face actually a threat to our wellbeing, to our health, and in some parts of the world to our survival. And I must say in this part of the world there is also increasing concern in the background that the effects of climate change, along with population pressures and depletion of fresh water aquifers, exhaustion of agricultural soils, depletion of ocean fisheries, that all of these things will add up to severe food shortages, fresh water shortages, in the region around us, causing destabilisation, most probably, increased flow of environmental refugees. It could lead to lots of tensions and conflicts. And that, of course, inevitably has a range of adverse health consequences. So, you know, it's a big picture and governments really need to get serious about understanding that climate change carries huge risks increasingly over the coming decades to wellbeing and health of human populations. Research Program Interviewer: This past year you were awarded an Australian Fellowship from the NHMRC. What does that mean for you and what is the work that you're going to continue doing?
Prof. McMichael:
Well, the first thing it means, of course, is it provides a
wonderful opportunity for me to think within a five‑year time frame
in the first instance, because I have funding for that period, and
it's very generous funding, so it's an opportunity to develop a
full‑blown program of research, particularly around the topic of
climate change and human health. I must say the timing is also quite
auspicious. What I'm in the process of doing now is recruiting a research team, developing this program, so we can engage not just within Australia, where our primary focus is, but also within the region at large begin to engage more with Asian and Pacific countries in developing a better understanding and making better use of comparative data from populations in different geographic and climatic circumstances, to get a better understanding of the risks that exist and a better capacity to model those risks, to understand how the disease patterns could change in future. Out of all of that, of course, to begin to work increasingly with government in the development of appropriate adaptive strategies to lessen risks to populations. Future Oriented Research Interviewer: It's quite an exciting time for epidemiology, because we interviewed on this series recently John Hopper, in Melbourne, and we discussed the comment about being an epidemiologist you're often looking backwards. But in fact you're going to be looking backwards and forward at the same time, so this is almost like a new dimension. Prof. McMichael: It is. It's quite challenging in that respect, in that very often when you're dealing with environmental health problems the agenda really is to understand from recent experience what the health risks have been and then to take appropriate action to eliminate that exposure. Now for something like climate change, of course, we can't realistically talk about eliminating the exposure, no matter what we do ‑ and we now understand this better than we did five or 10 years ago. No matter what we do, climate change is going to continue for the next few decades and I must say on current appearances and the difficulties national governments around the world are having in achieving a radical and progressive way of curtailing the problem, that it's going to escalate foreseeably for a number of decades. So this is really an unusual challenge for epidemiologists to have to engage not just in studying the world as it is around us at the moment, but trying to work with mathematicians, modellers, climate scientists and others, social scientists, to try and foresee the ways in which these risks will play out and to develop strategies for lessening those risks. Inspiration Interviewer: What inspired you to start on a research career? I note that you initially did a medical degree? Prof. McMichael: Yes.
Interviewer:
And I'm not sure whether you've ever practised medicine. Prof. McMichael: Well, it was really on environmental issues, the spaceship earth notion that we live within this closed system, this little planet, and the damage that we do to the environment around us will have ways of coming back to bite us, and particularly as the scale of that damage begins to increase we will start to see systemic changes on a larger scale that would have wider ranging consequences for human health both now and into the future. And I suppose the climate change story which I started to notice about 15 years later, in the mid 1980s, was really an extension of that longstanding interest. And I saw it coming over the horizon and I thought this is, firstly, very interesting, I must find out about it, but secondly this looks to me as if it's going to have very important consequences for human health. So I got involved in reading about it. I remember when I was president of the Public Health Association of Australia in the late 1980s I actually concentrated on it in my presidential address and said we need to take notice of this. Not many people did at that stage. But in the subsequent decade or two, it's really come clearly on to the agenda. And now it's fair square on the agenda and I'm hoping to really carry it forward with this new program of work. Careers for Young People Interviewer: It seems like a great time to think about a career for younger people in the area of epidemiology. It doesn't matter what their background is ‑ if you're a mathematician, as you say, or a computer modeller, or interested in the environment, this would be a great time to get into the game. Any advice to any younger people who are trying to think about what they could do in the future and why should they become an epidemiologist?
Prof. McMichael:
Well, I think the first advice is don't be fainthearted. You don't
have to imagine that you've got to have a lot of specialist skills.
This is an area in which we're all learning. I've had to pick up
ideas, information, from a range of disciplines in the last decade ‑
climate scientists, oceanographers, ecologist s. I've been listening
to them all and reading their stuff. I didn't have specialised
skills in those areas, but I've learnt enough to be able to
integrate it now with my epidemiological research and to know with
whom I should collaborate. I mean, this is an area in which we need
multidisciplinary collaboration. So young people shouldn't imagine
that they're entering a terrifying world of science in which they're
going to be solely responsible for carrying out research. It'll be a
team effort and it'll be good fun and it will be very important. Interviewer: On that upbeat note I thank you very much for your time and wish you well with your Australian Fellowship. It sounds like you're going to enjoy it. And all the best for the future. Prof. McMichael: Thank you very much. It's going to be a challenging five years, but it's timely and I think we're going to do some good and important work. ■
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