Lies and more lies. This is how a Facebook post describes a campaign by the Portuguese Cardiology Foundation on the impact of climate change and pollution on cardiovascular health.
The Foundation’s initiative aims to reveal that “climate change, noise, air and light pollution increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.” However, in the comments section of many of the posts on Fundação Portuguesa de Cardelogia’s Facebook page, there are people who deny the impact of these factors on heart health.
In one of these comments, the campaign is alleged to have been set up to “cover up” the “known and dangerous side effects of vaccines on the heart” and this institution is accused of conforming to “pseudoscientific perceptions and hoaxes.”
After all, climate change and pollution may or may not have an effect on cardiovascular health?
Although the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes that it is a challenge to “accurately estimate the magnitude and impact of health risks”, this UN specialized health agency ensures that it is “unequivocal that climate change affects human health”.
In many reports of the World Health Organization Designed to monitor the responses of many countries to “health threats posed by climate change,” it is also guaranteed that air pollution “can have direct and sometimes serious health consequences.” but why? Because “fine particles” enter the “airway” and increase “morbidity and mortality” by contributing to the development of problems such as “infections or diseases of the respiratory system, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive impairment.”
In this context, an article published in the scientific journal “Nature Reviews of Cardiology” He notes that “the combined effects of heat, air pollution, age, and socioeconomic and health status are responsible for acute preventable cardiovascular events.”
The same source notes that several studies show that exposure to “heat and particulates” had a “severe” effect on mortality “from cardiovascular disease,” for example, In Russia 2010. in the same sense, study conducted in the Iranian city of Mashhad concluded that “with the increase in temperature and the number of hot days, the deaths from cardiovascular diseases increase.”
Finally, too Directorate General of Health It has a section of its website dedicated to alerting residents to Health risks of heat waves People with chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, are identified as being most susceptible to heat. And if it is true that heat waves have always existed, they are increasing increasingly More intense, more frequent and lastinga change that scientists tend to attribute to climate change.
In short, scientific evidence shows that climate change and pollution can affect cardiovascular health.
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This article was developed within the scope of European Media and Information Fundan initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund rests with the author(s) and may not necessarily reflect the positions of EMIF, the Fund’s partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
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