Nurses in Puerto Rico See First-Hand Health Crisis from Climate Disasters

By Phil McKenna
Oct 26, 2017

A group of nurses who volunteered in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria gave harrowing accounts of what they saw in hospitals, homes and isolated towns there at a meeting with members of Congress on Thursday.

"Children, hungry and sick, clinging to their crying mothers, who were begging for food to feed their families. Frail elders exposed to excessive heat and rain, desperate for drinking water and forced to make terrible choices to either suffer from severe dehydration or drink from contaminated rivers and streams that could also lead to death," Cathy Kennedy, a registered nurse and Vice-President of National Nurses United, said recounting what she and others saw on the island.

The ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico is surfacing many of the health risks associated with climate change—risks that are becoming more common as global temperatures rise and that are raising concerns across the nursing profession.

This week, an international nursing society published a special-edition journal focused on those risks. It includes 11 studies detailing how climate change is exacerbating human health threats, including infectious and chronic disease, mental health, food security, disaster planning and social disparities, and how the nursing profession can address these emerging challenges.

"Recent natural disasters have had considerable health consequences, including deaths in nursing homes and an extreme lack of access to medical services," Eileen Sullivan-Marx, dean of New York University's Rory Meyers College of Nursing and an editor of the special issue, said in a statement. "Now more than ever, it is critical that the nursing community work with other health professionals to plan for changing conditions."

The studies, published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship by The Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International, addressed a multitude of challenges that health providers face worldwide.

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Another study focused on social justice issues associated with climate change and human health. Climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050: including 38,000 per year due to heat exposure in elderly people; 48,000 due to diarrheal disease; 60,000 due to malaria; and 95,000 due to childhood undernutrition, according to a 2014 study by the World Health Organization.

"Those who contribute least to global warming are those who will disproportionately be affected by the negative health outcomes of climate change," the authors of the new study write.

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"I don't remember ever teaching or learning in my career what it would mean to not have electricity for a certain period of time, because it wasn't in our thinking that that would happen," Sullivan-Marx said. She said new manuals will likely have to be written about what to do if you are a nurse working in a health-care facility and electricity or air conditioning or fuel for a back-up generator is unavailable for an extended period of time.

As the public health implications of extreme climate events grow, nursing groups are stepping up their response efforts and calling on government officials to do the same.

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Christine Grant, a registered nurse from Washington, D.C., who recently returned from Puerto Rico, said her team initially focused on providing medicine but quickly switched to distributing food and water to remote areas that were not receiving it from the federal government.

"It just made no sense to me that small groups of nurses were able to get this up and running, that we could figure it out and have these small minivans to get out to the remote areas to distribute food and water," Grant said. "With the resources and the manpower that they have they could have done so much better."

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