Students want more environmental health taught in medical schools

A group of American students at Harvard Medical School are calling for more courses on climate health at university. Image: Shutterstock

Around the world, medical students are demanding that the health consequences of extreme weather events be taught as part of their curriculum. These days, there's no denying that environmental health has become a key issue in the training of the doctors of the present and the future.

Offer more courses on climate health in medical schools: this is the demand of a group of students, whose voice has been relayed in an article published in early August in the journal Nature Medicine. Called “Students for Environmental Action in Medicine,” the group is made up of medical students at Harvard Medical School (USA). They are calling for curriculum reform, and suggesting ways to implement it. In 2022, a pilot teaching program was set up at the prestigious institution's medical school, to approach lung and heart health from the angle of the climate crisis, for example by studying cardiorespiratory problems linked to temperature changes and air pollution.

The result has been a long-term collaboration between students and teaching staff, who are discussing and developing programs together to better integrate the subject of climate change into university curricula. The idea is to make ecology a cross-cutting theme by including the issue of environmental health in every course, so as not to add an extra burden to the (already dense) curricula of medical studies.

Also read: Extreme heat exposure on the rise for millions of kids: UN

250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050

And it's not just at Harvard that this issue is being discussed. As the article in Nature Medicine points out, 55% of the 150 medical schools and teaching hospitals surveyed each year in the US included climate change as a compulsory or optional course in 2022. In France, the idea is also gaining ground. Since the start of the 2023 academic year, a compulsory six-hour module on “environmental health” has been deployed in some 30 medical universities. Aimed at second- and third-year medical students, the program aims to educate students about the health consequences of the degradation of the planet, as well as the impact of our healthcare system on the environment.

Over the past few decades, scientific literature has increasingly shown that extreme climatic events (forest fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, storms, hurricanes, etc.) have harmful effects on physical and mental health. A recent study, for example, demonstrated how smoke inhaled during forest fires can increase the risk of dementia. According to World Health Organization estimates, nearly 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 could be attributed to heat-related undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and stress alone.