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Climate Crisis Killing Children: Diarrhea Edition [1]
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Date: 2023-01-18
Not a picture of a child with diarrhea, but a lovely little chap... who deserves a chance to live.
This will be quick and dirty, because I am up against a deadline at work and just wanted to get the reporting out there. It is not new. It is not unexpected. The climate crisis, after all, is the ultimate intersectional calamity – because everything that happens on this planet (EVERYTHING!) happens within the climate.
But it is gut wrenching. Children are already so vulnerable, so underserved, so on the fraying, ragged edges of viability in so many places on this planet, that anything that seems new in the litany of challenges they face in poorer/usually browner places clutches at the heart.
From grist.com:
Diarrhea, both common and preventable, is among the most dangerous threats to young children in the Global South, where clean water and medical care are often scarce. Diarrheal diseases, and the intense dehydration that accompanies them, kill more children under 5 years old than almost anything else — more than half a million children every year — primarily in middle- and low-income countries. Many parts of the globe have made progress against the viruses, bacteria, and parasites that cause diarrhea in recent decades — but climate change is threatening to slow those advancements. In low-income countries, many people lack access to clean municipal water and toilets. Open defecation pits are still the norm in parts of the world that lack the resources to build out sanitation systems. And people get their drinking and washing water from open rivers, streams, and ponds. During extreme flooding events, bacteria from excrement can leach into water sources and infect people. More flooding events and longer wet seasons mean more people are potentially exposed to dangerous pathogens that lead to diarrhea.
According to reporting in Forbes:
The climate crisis is destabilizing and altering the global water cycle — exacerbating a phenomenon called “dry-becomes-drier, wet-becomes-wetter.” Unseasonal heavy rains during a dry season might result in a sudden and drastic uptick in the concentrations of pathogens entering water sources.
That is all I will quote. There’s more in both Grist and Forbes on where this is happening, why it is happening, the reasons that drought is also a precursor of diarrheal illness, and the myriad harms that are being caused.
When we in the first world west think about climate change, we so often think of obvious, discrete, well-publicized harms: dying polar bears, flooding, supercharged hurricanes, sea level rise. And we think about mitigation, and how we can escape, or plan ahead, or move to higher ground.
But there is so much more. SO. MUCH.
This crisis is intersectional on an epic scale. We are all trapped on this planet together. We are all living on a planet that is roughly 8,000 miles in diameter, with a slim layer of atmosphere that extends all of only about 60 miles – approximately the distance from Manhattan to Tom’s River, NJ – above the surface where we stand. And it is all connected. There are no barriers to the flows of gases and liquids and heat and pollution – we humans draw firm lines between countries, but nature does not.
We need to do more than we are doing. Our governments need to be pulled up by the short hairs and held to account. Fossil fuel corporations need to be brought to their knees.
When will this happen? Who will be the catalyst? Do we have time? Do we have the will? Only time will tell. In the meantime, innocent fucking kids are DYING OF THE SHITS because of this situation. I genuinely have no words for our callous collective cruelty as human beings.
_______________________
Thank you for reading.
-Kira Thomsen-Cheek
Twitter: @KiraOnClimate
Instagram.com/climaterevolutionary
If not us – who? If not now – when?
Asking did not work.
Voting did not work.
Marching did not work.
Emissions keep going up.
Our leaders have failed us.
#ClimateRevolution
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/1/18/2147973/-Climate-Crisis-Killing-Children-Diarrhea-Edition
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