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Posted on 11/07/2021 6:31:18 AM PST by TigerClaws
When a patient in her 70s came into the emergency department at Kootenay Lake Hospital in Nelson, B.C., Dr. Kyle Merritt had no idea hundreds of people were dying of heat across the province.
It was late June, and British Columbia was consumed under a heat wave that would soon go down as both the hottest and deadliest in Canadian history.
The head of the hospital’s emergency department, Merritt could see the aggravated toll the extreme heat took on patients battling multiple health problems at once, often with little money.
“She has diabetes. She has some heart failure. … She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning,” says Merritt of the senior patient.
“All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she's really struggling to stay hydrated.”
As the mercury climbed, more patients arrived and pressure on the hospital mounted. Merritt and his colleagues tried to make sense of a surge in heat illness most had only seen in medical school.
“We were having to figure out how do we cool someone in the emergency department,” says the doctor. “People are running out to the Dollar Store to buy spray bottles.”
Merritt remembers hitting a tipping point, the extreme heat an opening salvo in another summer of crisis. He started contacting other doctors and nurses, in Prince George, Kamloops, Vancouver and Victoria.
The response was immediate. Roughly 40 doctors and nurses at the small hospital — all busy trying to manage a pandemic and their regular professional lives — came together under the banner Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health.
“I was worried about the summer that was coming,” says Merritt of the rising number of health-care workers desperate to talk about how climate change is affecting their patients’ health.
“I was really quite amazed at how many people have decided to jump in.”
Just as doctors and nurses started to make sense of the record heat, it cleared — only to be replaced by a blanket of wildfire smoke. Climate change enters the ER
Like so many summers in recent memory, this summer, Nelson’s air turned the colour of pea soup, leading to a spike in patients suffering respiratory problems.
B.C.’s Interior suffers some of the greatest fallout from air pollution in the country.
Between 2013 and 2018, the 10 census divisions in the country with the greatest exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) were all in B.C.’s Interior, according to a 2021 Health Canada analysis of the impacts of air pollution on human health.
Of those, half the census divisions — including Central Kootenay, where Nelson is located — were among the top 10 slices of the country with the highest per capita rates of premature death.
“A lot of people in the Kootenays sort of thought that this would be a good place to hide out while the rest of the world falls apart. But it's, of course, hitting us here, just like it's hitting many places, and we're really seeing the impacts,” says Merritt. Flourish logoA Flourish chart
Like death by heat, doctors have traditionally struggled to clinically attribute mortality and severe illness to air pollution. For Merritt, this summer’s wildfire season changed all that.
When a patient came in struggling to breathe, Merritt knew the smoke — that hadn’t lifted from the region for days on end — had made a case of asthma worse.
For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”
“If we're not looking at the underlying cause, and we're just treating the symptoms, we're just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” he told Glacier Media when asked why he did it.
“It's me trying to just ... process what I'm seeing. We're in the emergency department, we look after everybody, from the most privileged to the most vulnerable, from cradle to grave, we see everybody. And it's hard to see people, especially the most vulnerable people in our society, being affected. It's frustrating.”
At the same time, Merritt says he hoped another family physician would read the chart, and one day, consider drawing a straighter line between their patients’ health and climate change.
Smoke and heat affect more than peoples’ physical health. Merritt says he saw a number of patients already suffering from depression or anxiety have their symptoms worsen during the wildfire season. Wildfire smoke even triggered flashbacks in a patient who was coping with post-traumatic stress disorder from his time as a soldier.
As the medical community learns more about the devastating impacts of smoke and heat, even people who don’t suffer from pre-existing health conditions are facing tough decisions, including doctors like Merritt.
“This past summer, it was so bad for about three weeks,” says Merritt.
“What do you do with your children? You know, I have three kids, and they're inside, it's summertime, we've just got through COVID. And they want to go out and jump on the trampoline. So I have to try and figure out: Is that safe?” Premature deaths due to air pollution Premature deaths per year, per 100,000 population associated with exposure to NO2, ozone and PM2.5 air pollution for census divisions in Canada for 2016. Health Canada Doctors at the feet of power
As global heating takes centre stage in Glasgow this week, Merritt and about 40 other nurses and doctors are taking their concerns to Nelson’s city hall, where the group will rally alongside at least 130 more health-care workers demonstrating at the provincial legislature in Victoria.
“We wanted to do something big. We wanted to gather at the feet of power,” says Dr. Kelly Lau, a family physician based in Vancouver, who is among those headed to Victoria Nov. 4.
Starting Thursday at noon, Lau says the non-partisan group is calling on the provincial government to, among other things, declare an “ecological emergency” and end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
“A lot of us were really shook by this summer, by the heat dome and the wildfires that are just escalating every year,” she says. “This is about moving forward in a way that saves lives.”
Simply ducky...Quack, Quack...
Those Canadians should have just gone back in their igloo’s.
Psychology already has a diagnosis for this,”Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Nevertheless those other symptoms have nothing to do with the climate.
or Government induced STRESS
What would he call it if she had frozen to death?
Wet a sheet
Drape over patient
Repeat as necessary
(really dumb set of medical "professionals" on staff there!)
BTW, what was the actual temperature?
A political diagnosis for a politicized profession.
Make no doubt about it - there’s a reason they’re redefining “systemic racism” and “gun violence” as “health crises”.
Doctors will start diagnosing them as such.
This is the ultimate socialization of medicine.
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What? First snow of winter or something?
The good doctor suffers from Useful Idiot Syndrome.
Huh...Red Cross First Aid course and manual covers quite clearly, just as you posted.
Of course mothers have been doing that for centuries.
Wonder if their ER section has those paper bed covers to save laundry costs.
If it wasn’t so sad this would be laughable. The state of formally trusted agencies in America, (I know this is in Canadastan, but they aren’t much different than us), has been lost in the past 2 years. It shows how the sane members of society has been asleep at the switch for many years.
No telling what garbage these so-called universities are teaching. In the past month we’ve learned that CRT isn’t taught in K-12 public schools, just in law schools. Yeah right.
And now this? We also know the halls of higher education has embraced the totally made up “Transgenderism” rather than what it is gender dysphoria.
I’m just about to the point you cannot trust a doctor or a lawyer under the age of 50 and even then they too are suspect. We need to focus on education reform immediately. We would be best off if we looked at how we educated kids before 1900. The commies have owned the education system since then.
I am also suffering from c;limate change. I have suffered with the climate change 72 times.
Thats my age.
I have been exposed and made to suffer each of my years as Summer changes into fall into the horrible clutcjhes of winter climate change.
And its ALL the fault of human beings. They have tipped the world off ist axis by some 30 degress and so we havbe to put up with the cold and die of exposure and all sorts of illnesses.
Wwe badly need to planet tipped to its roper axial oriantation. We are so fortumnate that we have Great and Jpe Biden on the same page to right the wrongs perpetrated against huimanity by the axias tipping crew of big industry and all of their running digs!
TIP IT BACK STRAIGHT TODAY!
We had a fairly mild summer. It rarely gets above 90 in Blacksburg but we are at a lower altitude now so we had a few days at 90.
You read my mind!
This Quack is in line for an NIH/CDC position.
2021 is the year “believe the science” became “believe the magic”.
“Climate Change” is that old fashioned magic...since it can cause anything anywhere....
Patient as suffering from ‘climate change
Frost bite?.
I live in that area. While I don’t think much of this rhetoric about climate change, it was incredibly hot at that time, around 110 F. We had temperatures well over a hundred for five days in a row June 27 to July 1 and this was the case all over British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and most of Idaho. There were over five hundred deaths in BC from heat prostration. With the COVID and opioid overdose situations already keeping emergency responders busy, this overloaded the system with people waiting hours for ambulance service.
The report is a bit off the mark as to the forest fire smoke problems. Those came about a month after the severe heat wave. We had clear skies during the severe heat and no fires started in our region for at least a week or two after it ended with some thunderstorms that came through. Further west they had fires during the severe heat and that destroyed the small town of Lytton BC. But that smoke never came our way. We got it from much closer fires within 50 to 100 miles of here, and the worst of it came at the end of July and first two or three days of August.
I came down with COVID like symptoms myself in that smoke episode. It was still rather hot then but just the regular 85 to 90 heat that we always have here in the summer. But the air quality index here was at 400 when “normal” air quality would be around 10 to 30. Either the smoke got to my lungs or I picked up the COVID because I had about three days with symptoms like pneumonia and couldn’t fully catch my breath especially if I tried walking up hill. It is very hilly around here too.
Anyway getting back to the doctor and his angst about climate change, we’ve now had about three of these smoky summers in the past five and it has been very easy for leftist alarmists to spread the climate change mantra, as people don’t seem to realize that forest fire smoke was always part of the climate here, we had some fairly good decades with very little of it around from maybe the 1960s to the 1980s and that tends to be regarded as the “normal” climate but apparently going back further the smoke was often a problem before those decades, as it has become more recently again. Even so, bad fire seasons were maybe one out of five for quite a long stretch before we had these past seasons, 2018 was also very bad for smoke here and it lasted about a month that time. We were on a long road trip and missed all but the last week of that episode (by going south into the desert, rather ironic — that was the summer that northern CA had their mega-fires and we drove under that smoke plume on the way down to Nevada).
I feel like I made a full recovery from the maybe-COVID maybe-smoke inhalation and will perhaps never know if I had one or the other. Stayed out of the hospital (it would have been a different one than this report as I live closer to Trail BC than Nelson). Hopefully not all the medical people were as clueless about heat prostration as these folks but despite our normally hot summers I don’t think past heat waves had ever created quite as many emergency cases, in the past a really hot day around here would be in the 95 to 100 range not 110 like we had, and the nights never cooled down much so everyone without a/c had readings approaching 90 inside their homes, trailers must have been worse than that.
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