Prof. Frederica Perera and Dr. Kari Nadeau Discuss Climate Crisis-Related Children's Health Harms (July 7th)

In mid-June Columbia's Professor Frederica Perera and Stanford's Dr. Kari Nadeau published a review article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled, "Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children's Health."  The article provides an overview of the numerous health harms inflicted on children around the world resulting from fossil fuel combustion's released of massive amounts of airborne fine respirable particles, additional health harms resulting from an increasingly destabilized climate, resulting health disparities and an overview of medical practice recommendations to minimize related health risks to children.  Concerning health harm, last year Harvard along with three UK universities concluded fossil fuel pollution was responsible for eight million deaths or 18% of total global deaths in 2018.  In the US, pollution resulting from fossil fuel’s use accounts for nearly 60% of total excess deaths.  

During this 38-minute interview Professor Perera and Dr. Nadeau begin by providing an overview of the numerous adverse health effects imposed on children resulting from both fossil fuel combustion and the innumerable harms resulting from global warming.  The authors identify solutions to mitigate the climate crisis, opine on efforts by the professional medical community to address the climate crisis, notes the work the Medicaid program needs to do to address related health harms to children, comment on their own university's efforts ,      

 Frederica P. Perera is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and serves as Director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health.  Her areas of specialization include prevention of environmentally related developmental disorders and disease in children, cancer prevention through the use of novel biomarkers, environment-susceptibility interactions, and risk assessment.  Her recent research is also addressing the multiple impacts on children's health and development of fossil fuel combustion--both from the toxic pollutants emitted and climate change related to CO2 emissions.  She is the author of over 350 publications, including 300 peer-reviewed articles, and has received numerous honors.   She received her Ph.D, DrPH and MPH from Columbia University and her BA from Harvard. 

Dr. Kari Nadeau is the Naddisy Foundation Endowed Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University.  Among other current activities she is currently working at the World Health Organization on air pollution and climate change policy.   In collaboration with colleagues she has been awarded many patents, started 4 biotech companies, and worked in industry to shepherd two drugs through the FDA to approval. She also is an author of the Lancet Countdown in Global Climate Change 2020 and the book: The End of Food Allergy (published 2020).   Dr. Nadeau received her MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School through the NIH MSTP program. She completed a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and a clinical fellowship in allergy, asthma and immunology at Stanford and at University of California, San Francisco.

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