Potential Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Public Health

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Mendez-Lazaro P. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Climate change is an important and emerging threat to public health, some of its impacts being related to the reduction of the water quality and quantity, food security, control of infectious disease and protection from disasters. Global warming from rising average temperature and carbon dioxide concentration is likely to make it more challenging to meet environmental quality standards necessary to protect public health and most vulnerable populations [1-3]. There is a global concern that climate change will make certain environments suitable for some vector-borne diseases, worsening their already significant global burden and potentially reintroducing into areas previously eradicated diseases [4-5].