ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND HEALTH

✒ Dr. Arsène Bienvenu Loembe

Health, good health of course, is the necessary and imperceptibly prior condition for our stability and our physical and emotional well-being. Our quality of life, and that of our loved ones, relates in many ways to the degree of strength of our health. That´s the reason why we fi ght all the endogenous and exogenous actions that disturb it or that deteriorate its normal healthy and balanced state. The quality of air, water, food, sanitation services and health care at different territorial and outpatient levels, allows us to measure the general physical health around us and the healthy or perverse effects of these matters over people and the social community where their lives unfold. The fi ght against climate change integrates many elements of health defense and protection, as well as against diseases associated with the lack of care for the natural environment. Doctor Loembé is an experienced and well recognized Medical Doctor and Scientist, graduated from the “Free University Medical Center” in Amsterdam, with more than eighteen years of experience in clinical oncology and cancer drugs research and development, and a growing interest in the impact that climate change has on the incidence and prevention of cancer. All this work, research and experience, will be refl ected, and be part, of a book of imminent publication.

Dr. Vicente López-Ibor Mayor

As a true and firm believer of science but also of equal opportunities for all – all men are created equal-, I admire Abraham Lincoln, son of a farmer and carpenter and unanimously considered as one of the greatest presidents of the United States of America. Thanks to his courage and, convinced that a divided house could not stand, he saved the Union.

Doris Kearns Goodwin masterfully describes Abraham Lincoln’s political talents and strengths in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Team of Rivals” where she brilliantly wrote how Lincoln, unexpectedly and against all odds, won the presidential election in 1860 above three accomplished candidates.

Unfortunately, five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, officially ending the American Civil War, on the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

When I lately get to know more about Lincoln’s life and legacy, among all other statements and quotes, there is one that I considered as the most inspiring and which has guided me along my professional and personal life. In the conclusion on his first political announcement on March 9, 1832, Abraham Lincoln, while seeking his first seat in the Illinois General Assembly, mentioned: A

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”

I have decided to render myself worthy by modestly attempting to raise awareness on the impact of climate change on health. I hope that by the end of this chapter, I will unpresumptuously succeed to convince you and myself to take preventive actions to reduce the impact of climate change on health and particularly on cancer- a fourthousand-year-old disease-, which is one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

I am attempted to think and probably to admit that the crisis, if we can talk about crisis, about the global warming is not (yet) desperate, as “despair serves no purpose when reality still offer hopes”, had taught us Al Gore in Our Choice [1] . Undoubtedly there is hope, there are always been hopes and hopes had always given our humanity a hand when we had to face difficulties. Is not the young preacher from Georgia who was dreaming that one day, “We will hew up from a mountain of despair a stone of hope” in that sweltering August in 1963 in Washington DC? Is not the former legendary prisoner of Robben Island, who exhorted us that “there were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. “Our faith is humanity is commonly tested now, I believe.