The Health Ministry in Israel says that there is a correlation between global warming and the increase in the number of Israelis hospitalized for heart, brain and vascular diseases.
The ministry researcher leading the team examining the effects of the climate crisis on the health system said that the warmer various Israeli cities become, the more hospitalized patients there are.
While the World Health Organization sees climate crisis as the greatest health threat facing humanity, leading medical journals to point to a correlation between global warming and the rise in diseases, pandemics and mortality.
In Israel, which according to available data, warms up twice as fast as the world average, the health ministry only recently started looking into the warming effects on the local population’s disease rate.
In the past year the Health Ministry realized it could no longer ignore the issue and launched a comprehensive study of climate change’s impact on serious diseases among Israelis.
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Preliminary findings from the research- which consists of data from more than 1 million hospitalized patients in most of Israel’s hospitals during 2011-2020- indicate a clear correlation between global warming and the rise in the number of hospitalized patients, the scientists say.
Ministry officials did not say how high the documented rise was, noting they were still examining the numbers’ breakdown among the various cities and the warming effect in each one on the disease and mortality rates.
Reacting, Dr Isabella Karkis of the Health Ministry’s Department of Environmental Epidemiology and who is the research team leader said, “We understand the climate crisis has impacts we haven’t examined yet,”.
Karkis and her team are working with the Meteorological Service and Professor Lena Novack, a bio-statistician of the Negev Environmental Health Research Institute.
A ministry official said that the scientists gathered data from hospitals in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Be’er Sheva, Israel’s four largest cities.
“For years there was an assumption that we’re immune to the hazards of heat waves in Israel because we are acclimatized to the Middle East conditions and used to heat. This study undermines this assumption and shows that heat waves impact disease rate here too,” says Nir Stav, head of the Meteorology Service.
Speaking further, he said, “these new findings are especially important because we see a clear trend in the rising frequency of heat waves and their intensity, and the climate forecasts make it clear that our future is strewn with heat waves both in summer and in the spring and autumn.“
Story was adapted from HAARETZ.
