by Samantha Stainburn
Sandy was a devastating storm but ultimately not an unusual one, says Philip Alcabes, Ph.D., director of public health programs and a professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health. “That we face a new normal is suddenly self-evident,” he says. “Extreme weather is no longer unlikely, the once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing, no longer extreme. The new environment portends big changes for the nation, of course, and especially for Long Island.”
Dr. Alcabes studies history, policy and ethics in public health, and believes that government officials and medical experts now need to consider climate change when designing public health systems. “If extreme weather threatens the energy supply, hospitals might run on generators, but what will happen to the increasing numbers of people with chronic conditions who are under treatment in their own homes—the so-called patient-centered medical home, advocated by family physicians and home healthcare, increasingly offered to older Americans?” Dr. Alcabes asks. “What will become of patients who are no longer in need of acute medical care but are marooned in medical centers because their homes— or entire neighborhoods—are uninhabitable?”
Global warming also creates two new tasks for academics, he says. The first is investigating how changing ecosystems, agriculture and transportation might impact human health. “How will specific alterations in the balance of potentially harmful and potentially helpful microbes translate into health and illness?” he says. “How will altered food supplies change our nutritional fortitude and thus our defenses against illness?”
The second task is training health professionals for a new era. “Sandy revealed that if we continue to devote resources to managing emergencies but fail to think more comprehensively about persistent community management problems, more people will suffer without heat or light or elevators or running water, and their misery will go on longer,” Dr. Alcabes says.
“Public health is not just about providing services to the vulnerable in the moment when they’re vulnerable,” he adds. “It’s about changing the social structures and having more responsible government officials so that people aren’t suffering all the time, and the people who are suffering most don’t end up suffering even more when there’s a disaster.”
How best to prepare students for a health career in a world where the environment is changing? Dr. Alcabes is working on one idea. He and colleagues in the environmental studies department at Adelphi are looking at developing an environmental health concentration within the Master’s of Public Health program.
This piece appeared in the Erudition 2013 edition.
