Clinician Friendly Information Needed on Diseases Emerging Because of Climate Change | ID Week 2024

Detailed maps of showing the whereabouts of vectors. Databases amassing terabytes of data points about heat indexes and the like. The raw information available about climate change and emerging disease is nothing if not bountiful.

“We have all this data,” said Peter Rabinowitz, M.D., M.P.H, “but we're not very good at distilling it, so that the busy clinician can get a quick snapshot about what new diseases should they be thinking about in their area.”

Rabinowitz is a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences and director of the University of Washington School of Public Health Center for One Health Research and a co-director of the University of Washington Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness. He spoke at two sessions on about climate change at the 2024 ID Week meeting held last week and this past weekend in Los Angeles, one about a global approach to climate change and emerging diseases and the another from focusing on the perspective of clinicians.

Rabinowitz, who trained as a family physician, spoke with Managed Healthcare Executive iabout the need to make surveillance data abut emerging diseases and climate change useful and readily available to clinicians at the point of care, possibly through the electronic medical record.