DOM faculty anchor Climate Change panel at Arthritis Center symposium, grab headlines

While University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health epidemiology and biostatistics department chair Kacey Ernst, PhD, MPH, gave the keynote address at the 2024 Living Healthy With Arthritis Symposium, it was a smaller story of a Department of Medicine faculty member that took top headlines in the weeks following the event.

See a mini-photo gallery from the annual symposium’s panel discussion, “Assessing the Health Implications of Climate Change and Our Environment,” below. Moderating the panel was C. Kent Kwoh, MD, director of the UArizona Arthritis Center (which organized the event) and chief of the Division of Rheumatology.

Joining Dr. Kwoh on the panel were Fariba Donovan, MD, PhD, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and research scientist at the Valley Fever Center for Excellence; Randy Horwitz, MD, PhD, allergist, professor of medicine, co-director of the DOM Ambulatory Medicine Clerkship, and medical director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine; Julia Jernberg, MD, associate professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, director of the DOM’s Ambulatory Medicine Clerkship and Health and Societies Thread; and Art Sanders, MD, MHA, professor emeritus, Department of Emergency Medicine, and member, Sarver Heart Center.

The media attention on Dr. Jernberg, who also is director of the Arizona Climate and Health Group at UArizona Research, Innovation & Impact, focused on a paper in the journal Nature Communications that she was not an author on and which examined global projections of heat exposure of older adults. Instead, she was quoted as a geriatrician by KJZZ-Radio NPR Phoenix in a piece titled, “More than 200 million seniors face extreme heat risks in coming decades, study finds.”

Dr. Jernberg noted that people’s ability to manage heat diminishes as they age and inflammation, blood clotting and cellular breakdown go haywire under acute levels of heat stress. “It’s like one’s own body is disintegrating from the heat. You’ve reached the tipping point. And in older patients [that process] is much more lethal," she told KJZZ.

That article not only got picked up by Reddit, Ground news and Envirolink, but virtually every NPR station across the nation, numbering more than a thousand. See the DOM Media Mentions webpage for some of those on May 14-15.

Dr. Ernst’s keynote address title was, “Beyond the Forecast: The Interplay of Climate Change and Health,” and focused more broadly on general impacts globally to climate change on health and the environment and the negative boomerang affect between them, possibly worsening that effect. Some of her research has been on spread of the Zika virus due to expanded migration of mosquitos that carry it, due in part to climate change. She was in the audience during the panel discussion, which followed her talk.

For the images below, mouseover to read the caption. Click on them to enlarge.

MINI-PHOTO GALLERY:

   

   

   

   

Photos courtesy of David Mogollon, Department of Medicine communications manager.

DOM calendar item for this event.

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“Climate change and health focus of Living Healthy with Arthritis Symposium” | Posted April 25, 2024