Cutting global warming said to lead to positive health effects.

Moral of the story: Health improves as green house gas emisions fall.

Source: AMA Morning Rounds 12/28/09

Cutting global warming said to lead to positive health effects.

The AP (12/27, Borenstein) reported that research in a special issue of the Lancet suggests that "cutting global warming pollution would not only make the planet healthier, it would make people healthier too." United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the head of the World Health Organization," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, "Relying on fossil fuels leads to unhealthy lifestyles, increasing our chances for getting sick and in some cases takes years from our lives. ... As greenhouse gas emissions go down, so do deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. This is not a small effect." Linda Birnbaum, director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, explained that the Lancet studies looked "at the immediate benefits of doing something about the problem" rather than "looking at the health ills caused by future global warming, as past studies have."