From redefining aging to leading climate and health research

Linda Fried: From redefining aging to leading climate and health research

This story is part of the Columbia Climate School’s series celebrating women’s work in honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2022.Read more about the day and our related blog post here.

When Dr. Linda P. Fried Began as Dean of Columbia University Postman School of Public Health In 2008, she set out to find an answer to a key question: What factors will profoundly affect human health in the 21st century? As a geriatrician and epidemiologist, she knows that the problems facing humanity over the years will be different from those of the last century.

After extensive scenario modelling by her and her colleagues at the Mailman School, climate change will serious impact on human health All over the world in the near future.For example, Fried pointed out that climate change has hurricane Dangerous over the past few decades.In addition, heavier precipitation events can lead to frequent flooding, which can lead to a higher risk of malaria and cholera in tropical countries, such as PeruThe increased frequency of fires puts people at risk not only from the fires themselves, but also from poor air quality.

The urgency of these preliminary findings prompted Freed to take action. A year later, she launched the nation’s first climate and health program with colleagues at the school. Environmental Health Sciences Department. “When we started the project in 2009, most people thought we were talking about science fiction,” Freed said.

Despite the lukewarm and skeptical response, Fried made up his mind. Under her leadership, she has been helping researchers, professors and students better understand these issues and develop solutions to protect public health in the face of climate change.

Fried founded the postman school Climate and Health Program along with Joe Graziano, who is chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University.they recruited Patrick Kinney, an air pollution epidemiologist and now an associate professor in the School of Public Health, leads the program.Today, it is Jeff Sarman.

Freed is proud of the thriving effort after 14 years of tireless work, with more than 30 faculty members across the campus delving into the intricacies of how climate change affects public health. But scaling the program at a time when the climate crisis remains largely invisible to the general public has been a daunting journey for Fried and her team.

Avoid climate change indifference

When he started work in 2009, Fried said: “A huge challenge is that due to the [the politicization of climate science], one of our most important funders, the National Institutes of Health, will not fund research work on the health effects of climate change. “

“In the past, scientists couldn’t work in this field because they couldn’t get funding,” she added. “This makes charitable funding very critical.”

She observed that, until recently, the vast majority of donors have focused primarily on climate change mitigation — or reducing and avoiding greenhouse gas emissions — rather than climate change adaptation, including minimizing the negative impacts of climate change. “Research on adaptations that protect human health and well-being is critical. We must move to a balanced portfolio that studies mitigation and adaptation equally,” Fried explained.

Getting enough funding takes time and hard work, which is not only frustrating to Fried and her team, but deeply worrying for her.

“These are pressing issues that we need to address. We have the ability to address them, but we can’t do it without the resources. But, the resources weren’t there at the time. It will take years to build this critical program — mostly Charitable support—” Freed said.

Mainstreaming climate and health education

Four years after establishing the Climate and Health Initiative, Freed went on to create another initiative to accelerate education across the healthcare system on the health impacts of climate change. This time, the idea came from Alice Hill, former special assistant to President Barack Obama, who is leading policymaking on climate change and national security.

In 2013, the Obama administration realized that the health impacts of climate change were still neglected, but urgently needed. Hill approached Fried and suggested that there should be a program to educate healthcare professionals.

The idea got Fried so excited, she decided to pitch it to global leaders at the 2018 Global Climate Summit. Paris in 2015After she presented evidence of the impact of climate change on public health and the need for such initiatives, the World Health Organization declared the concept a key health outcome of the Paris Climate Agreement.

However, despite this response, no one volunteered to start the education program. Fried decided to start the program at the Mailman School, even though funding for climate and health was still very limited.

The Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled her to start what would become a leading organization called Global Alliance for Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) in 2017. GCCHE creates climate and health courses with help from experts around the world. Schools of the health professions dedicated to educating students on these issues offer these courses free of charge.

Today, more than 240 schools of public health, medical, nursing and other health professions are members of the Alliance’s global network. Thanks to GCCHE’s efforts, each of them has committed to adding education about the health effects of climate change to their curriculum.

While the dean of the Mailman College continues to work hard to challenge perceptions of public health, her journey to becoming a distinguished geriatrician began with the same curiosity and growth mindset.

dabbling in geriatrics

A native of New York, Fried earned a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1970. According to her profile in The New York Times Magazine, she worked as a social worker and paralegal for five years. New York TimesShe went on to pursue her MD at Rush Medical School in Chicago and trained in internal medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke Medical Center.

“I’m not going into geriatrics,” she said. As a general internist and epidemiologist by training, when she began her faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1985, she wanted to focus on how to prevent chronic diseases.

At the time, she was researching the role of physical activity in preventing cardiovascular disease. It was then that she met Dr. William R. Hazzard, who joined Johns Hopkins University to work in the field of geriatric medicine. “One day he said to me, I should be a geriatrician,” Freed said. “I told him that, frankly, I wasn’t interested because I was excited about the research projects I was already working on.”

“But when I saw the data on aging and life expectancy, I was taken aback,” Fried laments. “In the 20th century, we have increased life expectancy by 30 years, all thanks to public health measures and social investment, which is incredible. It’s incredible.”

She further realized that it is important for researchers to understand whether it is possible for the general public to not only live longer, but also lead healthy lives. “It was a very high-profile problem, and most people didn’t have research at the time. So, two days later, I changed my career and went into geriatric medicine,” recalls Fried.

Since then, she has authored more than 500 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Vulnerability as a medical term was ambiguous before her research. It is considered synonymous with disability and comorbidity, although it is very common among older adults.go through define vulnerability As a clinical syndrome, Fried has developed a powerful assessment tool for identifying, preventing and treating frailty in older adults.

Fried doesn’t see her work on geriatrics as separate from her work on climate change. “Some of the work I’ve done in defining frailty in aging is now related to how frail older adults are less able to deal with extreme weather events,” she explained.

“Frail older adults and infants are particularly vulnerable during heatwaves related to climate change. People around the world are now experiencing longer lifespans, which requires new expertise to understand how to keep people living longer stay healthy,” Fried added.

Strengthen collaboration between climate scientists and epidemiologists

Fried further noted that there is an interaction between infectious diseases like COVID-19, frailty and aging, and climate change. In the field of public health, the term “syndrome” is used to define different epidemics or health consequences that exacerbate each other.

For example, there is compelling evidence that climate change is exacerbating the global air pollution crisis. Exposure to air pollutants can damage an individual’s heart, lungs, brain and immune system, making them more vulnerable to severe COVID infection. Older people are already vulnerable to severe COVID infections that lead to higher hospitalization and mortality rates, so the additional effects of air pollution can be very severe for older adults.

“There are many other possible threats to climate change in terms of affecting life expectancy. It has not been modelled, but it is still an important potential impact that we need to understand,” she said.

Fried’s plan for the future is to continue to highlight how climate change is wreaking havoc on people’s lives. This includes developing the details of new research projects that Mehrman and Columbia Climate Institute faculty can work on together.

Fried reflects that in the past, the Mailman School of Public Health faculty and the Earth Institute (now part of the Columbia Climate Institute) have been deeply involved in cross-faculty research on environmental issues. “Both schools have a lot of good history to draw from,” she said. “I look forward and hope that we can give Columbia Climate School an edge on the health of climate change, which I think will complement the Climate School well.”