Climate change is killing Americans in surprising ways, and the waste created by health care itself is part of the problem, according to a report published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.

The report, published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet, is part of a global study examining how climate change affects global health.

Climate change has created a health crisis that continues to worsen, one that threatens to undermine the progress made over the past 50 years in public health, according to the report.

Lancet report on the countdown on health and climate change has been published annually since 2016. This year’s report calls on the world’s nations, and the United States, to rapidly reduce the amounts of fossil fuels burned while accelerating the transition to clean energy.

The health harms created by climate change are accumulating to be “on the same order of magnitude as the harms associated with medical errors,” said Jonathan Buonocore, a professor in the School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health. from Boston University and one of the journal’s authors.

(Preventable medical errors kill 250,000 Americans each yearaccording to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.)

Climate change impacts Americans’ health in several ways. The report cites air pollution linked to fossil fuelstropical cyclones worsened by climate change, The links between heat waves and premature births and the future effects of climate change.

On the positive side, the United States’ adoption of wind and solar power has led to approximately 1,200 to 1,600 fewer premature deaths in the United States in 2022 thanks to better air quality.

Health care waste is part of the problem, researchers say

The report highlights the link between the healthcare sector and climate change, with 8.5% of US greenhouse gas emissions coming from the industry. The researchers note that there is no national program that requires it to measure, manage or disclose its data.

This figure includes not only the energy used by hospitals and clinics, but also the enormous amounts of medical waste, often single-use plastic devices, that are thrown away every day, Buonocore explained.

All that disposable plastic is designed to help keep hospitals and operating rooms sterile, but researchers say there are ways to reduce waste without putting patients at risk.

Heating and cooling costs are also an issue. Operating room HVAC systems run 24/7 whether there is a patient or not, said Dr. Shaneeta Johnson, professor of surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, in Georgia.

Operating rooms generate a lot of waste

Operating rooms contribute to that in ways that patients may not think about, Johnson said.

“The operating room is responsible for about 30 percent of medical waste in the United States,” she said. This includes disposable instruments, plastic curtains, syringes, tubes, bandages and anything that could be contaminated with bodily fluids. THE the disposal of medical waste is regulated and in many cases it must be cremated.

One thing that hospitals have been working on is creating what are called “lite” surgical trays, that is, sterilizing and placing only those instruments on the surgical trays that the surgeon is likely to have. need, rather than all those he could want. This is done by working with surgeons so they can select the instruments they actually use while leaving out those that are not necessary.

“There are significant opportunities to make surgical trays lighter so we don’t autoclave as many instruments,” Johnson said. Studies show that such efforts can reduce a medical facility’s carbon footprint.

An autoclave is a machine that exposes surgical supplies to hot steam under pressure to sterilize them.

“We need to work harder to reduce waste. Both physical waste and resource waste due to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. All of this would save the country a lot of money and significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our industry,” said Dr. Vivian Lee, author of the book, “The long solution“, and research director at Harvard Business School, who wrote on the subject.

She emphasizes that for each hospitalized patient, more than 30 kilos of waste is produced every day in the United States, primarily due to the increase in disposable products. Some of the waste involves procedures that are essentially unnecessary. “Many professional societies have drawn up long lists of unnecessary treatments, such as antibiotics for colds or X-rays for back pain. All these wasted resources result in an excessive carbon footprint and very rarely help patients,” Lee said.

This article was originally published on USA TODAY: Report sounds alarm on deadly health effects of climate change