Student doctors push for the health impacts of extreme weather to be taught in medical schools, as the carbon emissions from healthcare come under greater scrutiny

_NATURE MEDICINE

The sky was black when Natalie Baker, a pre-medical student at Stanford University, woke up on a summer morning in 2019. The air in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, was thick with heavy smoke from one of the increasingly recurring wildfires in the state. “It looked like it was night-time outside, and my lungs physically hurt,” she recalls. Baker had to put on an N95 mask to cycle from her home to medical school. The next day, the free clinic where she volunteered flooded with patients having trouble breathing.

Baker is one of many students who are now pushing medical schools to add climate change to the curriculum. “This was something that is possibly the biggest determinant of public health in the century, and it wasn’t adequately covered in our curriculum when I started in med school,” she says.

For Baker (now a third-year medical student at Harvard University), her personal experiences showed the importance of learning more about climate change — so that she could assist her patients better. “I realized that going into medicine without treating or trying to look upstream at these environmental determinants of health felt incomplete in some way,” she says. “There’s just so much that determines health and a lot of it intersects with climate change.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change “the biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century”. Human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of health-harming extreme weather events such as wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and hurricanes. These weather and climate hazards directly and indirectly affect human health, increasing the risk of death and the spread of several illnesses, from cardiorespiratory to infectious and water-borne diseases.

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