Climate Change

We celebrate and welcome year 2012 like every other year before - gather together for countdown, fireworks, and partying all night long till the next morning, because the next day will be public holiday. Year 2012 also marks the year of what we are told to be the end of the world on 21/12/2012 – what a beautiful combination of numbers. Do you really believe it? The thing that we actually thought all this while that it won’t happen in our time is actually happening – to think about it really scared me out!!!

Those whom want to believe it, I leave it to you guys, but I personally do not believe that it happens so soon – we still can able to save our mother earth from dying. If I know I’m dying soon, I will do whatever I wanted to do - as long as I’m happy with it. This mindset will lead to more and more wrongdoing that threatens our planet. If we think the other way round, we will try our very best to safe it. The reason why our planet is dying so fast is because of us (human being) – our ever growing activities like burning of fossil fuel like coal, oil, and gas, deforestation, waste and etc. are altering the composition of atmosphere and contribute to climate changes.

Climate change includes global warming and other substance that increase the greenhouse gas amount in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are naturally occurred to act as a blanket, trapping heat and preventing it from being over reflected too far from the earth. They balance the earth’s temperature at an acceptable rate – warm enough for humans, plans, animals and all other living things to live on. Gases releases from human activities like factories, automobile, open burning, forest burning, electricity and etc will traps in the atmosphere and causes heat which leads to global warming. Global warming heat up our planet – on top of that, an average of few millions acre of trees being chopped every day, makes it nothing left to neutralized the heat. These leads to melting ice at Antarctica, Greenland and Himalayas which causes sea level to rise, affected those living in coastal regions and island.

Climate Change Effects on Our Health

The melting of ice causes floods in area where humans are living which leads to several types of illness and diseases like malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, dengue, yellow fever, hepatitis A and leptospirosis – I have mix them up, it actually divides into two categories, which are Water-Borne diseases(diseases that  came from drinking contaminated water) and Vector-Borne diseases

Water-Borne Diseases

i)                    Amebiasis 

          - Common type of disease when flooding. It is a type of gastrointestinal 

            infection.

ii)                 Cryptosporidiosis

          - Cryptosporidiosis has symptoms that are very similar to the common flu. It can   

            be accompanied by diarrhea, lost of appetite and sudden weight loss, and 

            nausea.

iii)               Giardiasis

          - A type of medical condition that is characterized by the infection of the small 

            bowel by an organism called the Giardia lambia

iv)               Cyclospora

          - A type of intestinal infection that spreads through the ingestion of  

            contaminated food or water.

Vector-borne Diseases

Vector borne diseases are pretty straight forward – it is transmitted to humans or animals by an insect or other arthropod. Common types of vector borne disease are malaria and dengue.

Climate change causes heat stress which killed a lot of people at some area. It also causes dirtier air which makes us hard to breath, in result causes asthma, lung infection, sore throat, and other symptoms may occurs. Dirty air slows down the body healing process – remember that I wrote the article title “cough”? I mention that I’m coughing. I’m still coughing now and the doctor says that climate changes and a lot of people coughing and it takes time to heal because the air we breathe is not clean.

This really shows that climate changes really affect the entire living thing on earth. Human are main culprit of this. I always believe in the ultimate law of cause and effect - and we are slowly getting the effects of what we have done to our mother earth. We can make changes by change the way we think and the way we lived. Be more conscious on how we can make the difference and do whatever necessary. We only have one earth and one life – if the earth is healthy, we are healthy too.