Climate Change, Human Health and the Role of Health Care Professionals
1:00 pm US Eastern Time
This special webinar, co-hosted with Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E) and Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC), was a discussion with author and professor Bill McKibben and pediatrician and professor Katherine Shea as they discuss how global warming impacts human health and what health care providers and the rest of us can do to address these problems.
Katherine Shea's new paper on Climate Change and Children’s Health: What Health Professionals Need to Know and What We Can Do About It, was written with Albert Einstein College of Medicine pediatrician Sophie J. Balk. MD.
Featured Presenters
- Bill McKibben, Middlebury College: Environmentalist Bill McKibben is a scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of "The End of Nature" (1989), the first book for a general audience about global warming. Recent books include "Enough" (2004), which critiques human genetic engineering and other rapidly advancing technologies; "Wandering Home" (2005), which catalogs his foot-travels across the Vermont landscape; and "Age of Missing Information" (2006), in which he compares his experience watching 1700 hours of videotaped TV to that of contemplating nature in the Adirondacks. Bill's latest book is, "Fight Global Warming Now The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community."
- Katherine M. Shea MD, MPH, Adjunct Professor, Maternal and Child Health: Katherine M. Shea is a board certified pediatrician and board eligible in preventive medicine with specialty training in environmental health. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health of the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and on the Adjunct Faculty of Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Shea is a technical consultant and scientific editor for World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Forum for Chemical Safety, and works part time at North Carolina State University Student Health Service as a staff physician. She has served as medical consultant to Physicians for Social Responsibility National Office, was a member of the Climate Change Taskforce convened by Environmental Defense, and a volunteer with her local public school system's School Health Advisory Committee. Currently she is vice president and member of the board of the Agricultural Resources Center, a nonprofit public interest organization which engages in research and public education on issues and policies related to safe food, family farm agriculture and preservation of natural resources with a special interest in pesticides. Dr. Shea is also actively involved in children's environmental health policy development with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the North Carolina Pediatric Society. In June 2007, Dr. Shea began work with the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill as a project director, working on outreach to the NC healthcare community around responding to health threats from climate change.
