Archival Tape -- Paul Holman:

“My name is Paul Holman, I've been a paramedic for a long, long time and on that night, when it come through, I turned the computer on to log on to start to manage this, and all I had on my computer screen, I couldn't see anything.

I couldn't see Melbourne, I couldn't see the suburbs or the streets because it was covered in red dots, which were calls and ambulances. And I thought, there's something wrong with my computer, you know, the program is playing up and I rebooted the computer because I didn't actually believe what I was seeing on the screen.

Everywhere. The whole of Melbourne was having an emergency. And as a paramedic, I will never be able to reconcile the fact that some people died on their front lawn waiting for an ambulance.”

[Theme music starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is ‘Climate Change Will Kill You’, a special series from 7am.

The planet is warming, and over the course of this series we’ve investigated how that has caused disaster, and death.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“She wakes up in the morning with me beside her and she’s wheezing and she can hardly breathe at all, this has to be the day of the big smoke.”

RUBY:

Last episode, we examined the impact of flooding.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #2:

“We looked across the paddock and all you could see was a house coming in the water.”

RUBY:

And, in episode one, the devastation wrought by heat and bushfires.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #3:

“Get outta here now, that way! Follow us out! Follow us!”

RUBY:

As time goes on and the science keeps coming in, the body count is rising and in ways no one predicted.

In this, our final episode, we’re looking at the ways in which climate change puts us more at risk of disease.

This is part three: Sickness.

[Theme music ends]

RUBY:

Paddy, can you tell me about the night in November 2016 when this all began, the night that Paul Holman was managing a series of emergency calls across Melbourne?

PADDY:

Yes, so it's a Monday, November 21, and it was the hottest November day that Melbourne had had in six years. There was a wild storm that came through, hit the city.

Archival Tape -- [wind and rain sounds]

PADDY:

And it was particularly severe out in one northern suburb called Mernda. I spoke to a family who lived there, Sam and Elsa were the couple and they lived with their two young kids, Jet and Julia.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“While I'm cooking, I look outside, it was so hot suddenly and then after that the wind come.”

PADDY:

They were at home when the storm struck, their home was surrounded by grassy fields.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“I can see the wind blowing stuff on the floor, curly curly wind you know around, and it was quite scary.”

RUBY:

Ok, so what happened to Sam and Elsa that day when the storm hit?

PADDY:

Well, earlier that day, Sam had been to the doctor about a cough. Sam had what Elsa called very controllable asthma. He had a puffer and he was easily able to manage it in their whole time together, he'd only ever had two attacks. And both times he'd been sick. And both times, he was able to manage it with a puffer.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“His asthma is really good and he normally is like really well. I don't see him use his puffer every day. It's only when he got a flu or a cold, then he starts to flare up a little bit, then he will need to use the puffer a bit more.”

PADDY:

So he wasn't feeling very well, but he went and he got Jet from school. And then as soon as he got home, went to bed to have a lie down.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“He was in the room, and he just like, at about 6 something he just came out from the room and he said, oh can you call me an ambulance?”

PADDY:

He came out of his bedroom struggling to breathe.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“He was just sitting on the couch over there and he was saying, ‘hurry, hurry’…”

PADDY:

And Sam just collapsed onto the floor of their lounge room in front of the whole family. She called the ambulance and was told that an ambulance was coming,

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“We waited and we waited, but still nothing come…”

PADDY:

But it took about half an hour to arrive, he’d stopped breathing and he had no pulse. They tried to clear his airway, but it wasn't until a second ambulance came up and gave him a shot of adrenaline that they were able to get Sam's circulation moving again. But it was the delay that really distressed her.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“While I'm waiting, his face gone blue, in my mind it's just a flash, I should put him in a car and just drive. But because I was so trusting of the ambulance, normally they just like come really fast.”

But have you ever heard of someone call an ambulance and the operator hang up on you? No. Only that person, I didn’t want to let go, I still hung onto the phone, and she said, ‘it's on the way ok?’”

PADDY:

Sam was one of three and a half thousand people who were hospitalised, but he was also one of the 10 who died from thunderstorm asthma.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“His brother only got to see him for a few hours, maybe, then we have to turn off his life support. So just like that. Gone.”

PADDY:

She had no idea that he could die from, you know, from an asthma attack, it had just, nothing like that had ever occurred with him before.

Archival Tape -- [News theme music]

Archival Tape -- New reporter #1:

“Let’s return to thunderstorm asthma now, the rare phenomenon which killed two people in Melbourne overnight…”

Archival Tape -- New reporter #2:

“The epidemic was triggered when the storm whipped up high levels of imflatorry grass pollen particles.”

Archival Tape -- New reporter #3:

“St Vincent's hospitals in Melbourne's inner north ran out of ventolin puffers.”

Archival Tape -- Unidentified hospital worker:

“Extraordinary 24 hours at the hospital, this is unprecedented in our history.”

RUBY:

So Paddy, this wasn’t just something Sam was experiencing. Across Melbourne, during this thunderstorm, people were having asthma attacks? What was that like?

PADDY:

So that night, hospitals and paramedics were completely overwhelmed. Thousands of people presented at Melbourne hospitals, 40 percent of them had never suffered asthma before.

It was the most devastating outbreak of thunderstorm asthma that the world had ever seen. Previously there had only ever been one fatality and none in Australia.

The head of Melbourne Hospital's emergency department described the scene as a war zone.There were ambulances queued up outside, trying to get patients in. It was unprecedented.

RUBY:

And so, why did this occur specifically on this night? How was the thunderstorm causing so many asthma attacks, including in people who had never before had an asthma attack?

PADDY:

Well, experts described it as like a bomb going off. It was a combination of the wet spring and the rapid growth of grasses that were putting the pollen into the atmosphere, as well as the thunderstorm that then dispersed the pollen all over Melbourne.

And scientists honestly were stunned at the level of impact, you know, at the number of people that were hospitalised, that were sent into respiratory distress and ultimately the number of people that died.

RUBY:

Ok, and so Paddy, this combination of events, the pollen and the thunderstorm, which led to the asthma attacks and to these deaths. What does it have to do with climate change?

PADDY:

Well, it's taken some years after the event, but scientists do say that there is a higher risk of thunderstorm asthma events like we saw in Melbourne in 2016 as a result of global warming.

And that's happening in a number of different ways. One way is, of course, that the chance of a, you know, wild thunderstorm is increasing. Secondly, there are studies which show that higher temperatures can increase pollen intensity. And also studies which show that higher CO2 levels when they, for example, pumped CO2 into a greenhouse, can lead to more intense pollen and more rapid growth of the grasses that like ryegrass that actually release the most pollen.

So, the combination of higher temperatures, higher CO2, could be extending pollen seasons worldwide and increasing the risk of this super pollen causing, you know, massive outbreaks of thunderstorm asthma.

RUBY:

And so what did Elsa think about this when she became aware of these links?

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“After he'd gone and then I start to read more about it, before that I never heard of thunderstorm asthma.”

PADDY:

She told me that it was surprising that pollen could kill people. She had never thought that.

Archival Tape -- Elsa:

“Like I think that type of weather is quite extreme and definitely linked to the climate change. I believe that.”

PADDY:

I think that's where the government really needs to step in and, you know, tell the community what's going on. And it's not just asthma. There are many diseases that are predicted to be more common due to global warming.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Paddy, we've been talking about an increase in asthma attacks as we experience more unpredictable weather events because of global warming. Can you tell me a bit more about other illnesses that we're going to see more of?

PADDY:

So a respiratory disease like thunderstorm asthma is kind of been an unexpected consequence of climate change.

But there's a lot of research in recent decades that shows that certain infectious diseases are going to become more common in Australia, particularly tropical diseases.

Mosquito borne vector borne viruses like Ross River fever, which occur mainly in the far north Queensland but are spreading south.

And I spoke to scientists who warned that we are entering a new age of pandemics and that although climate change doesn't necessarily cause an increasing incidence of pandemics, many of the causes of climate change are also that same things that are driving the rise in pandemics.

RUBY:

And so, can you tell me more about the relationship between climate change and illness, and the scientists who have been looking into it?

PADDY:

Yeah, it's a complex relationship, and it was actually, it was an Australian that pioneered the study of the relationship between climate change and health.

His name was Tony McMichael. Tony was an inspiration to everyone who worked with him, half of the scientists and doctors that I interviewed for this had studied under or been mentored by Tony.

He was a collegiate, warm, brilliant epidemiologist and he spent his life's work examining the different risks to human health from global warming.

So Tony was a prolific scientist who produced more than 300 papers and was still going full blast at his work when he died at the age of 72 from a strain of influenza that he picked up in Darwin. And I spoke to his widow, Judith Healy, a fellow academic at ANU.

Archival Tape -- Judith Healy:

“And he still had a lot of very important work that he was desperately keen to do because he knew that he had limited time, but he also knew that this was a coming crisis that people weren't paying enough attention to.”

PADDY:

He pioneered the concept of planetary health, the idea that human and animal worlds are intertwined, and the health is intertwined as well. That means urbanisation, deforestation, overpopulation, overconsumption, these megatrends that are forcing animals and humans together are also causing the rise of zoonotic diseases just like Covid-19.

Archival Tape -- Judith Healy:

“He was looking at deaths from various sorts of infectious disease where it was very clear that these diseases were happening through, you know, zoonosis. So climate change wasn't going to just affect bees and butterflies and polar bears. It was actually going to affect humans.”

PADDY:

And when I interviewed her, she said that, yes, in some ways, Tony did form part of the kind of bodycount from climate change because, you know, as she said, influenza is coming around more often these days.

Archival Tape -- Paddy:

Is he part of the body count?

Archival Tape -- Judith Healy:

“Well, yes, in that because he was vulnerable to infection, we're seeing more frequent strains of these viruses.”

PADDY:

Influenza is a zoonosis, she saw the irony, in fact, that Tony would succumb to an unknown strain of influenza when he'd been warning of this danger for so long. You know, It's a kind of sad story in a way that he didn't get to finish the work that he embarked on.

Archival Tape -- Judith Healy:

“10, 20 years ago, people thought, oh, you know, the era of infectious disease is over. We've got it sorted. But now we know differently. Viruses are cleverer than that.”

RUBY:

So one of the leading scientists researching the link between infectious disease and climate change died of an infectious disease while doing his research. So What is Tony’s legacy, Paddy, what impact will his research have?

PADDY:

So he set up the Doctors for Environment Australia group at around the turn of the century. He helped set up the Climate and Health Alliance to try and get a federal strategy on climate and health. And there no doubt his work continues. But he was simply stonewalled over the course of the last decade by both, actually, Labour and Liberal federal governments. Instead of acting on the research from scientists like Tony, we've sort of seen a denial that climate is a health problem.

You know, Australia has a fantastic track record on public health. We've seen it in the last year with our response to the pandemic. We saw it with our response to AIDS in the 1980s, which was world leading. We've seen it in our response to tobacco control. We've seen it with seatbelts. We've seen it with drink driving. We have a proud record of tackling public health issues head on and succeeding.

But with the public health risks of climate change, the response has been highly political. And unfortunately, it's been sidetracked by the climate wars that have wracked Australia and federal politics in particular for the last decade.

RUBY:

So in a sense, Paddy, you could say that it's not necessarily climate change that is killing us. It is the denial of it.

PADDY:

Yeah its ignorance in some because we haven't been warned.

You know, Australians have been losing their lives as a result of global warming. And that's not alarmist. That's just reality.

RUBY:

Mmm, this is obviously something you were extremely passionate about before even starting bodycount, but I wonder after interviewing all the people you did, people who have lost entire families, people who lost their homes, people who have essentially lost everything because of climate change, does this now weigh on you even more heavily?

PADDY:

Actually, paradoxically, and this is something I didn't expect, Ruby, is that the stories that I was told by the people that I spoke to gave me hope.

The love and the courage that the people I interviewed showed in the way they tell the story of how they lost their loved ones, gave me hope that Australians will look after each other when the chips are down. When there is a crisis, communities do rally together.

You know, people may or may not care about future generations, people may or may not care about loss of species and environmental harm, but they certainly do care about their own health and the health of their loved ones in their communities.

And that gave me some confidence that ourselves and our kids heading into a hotter world will be able to rally and manage the risks that we're facing and we will pull together.

And I think we've seen the same thing through 2020 in this country in the pandemic, a willingness to put the community first and to work together. And I hope that this will also inspire people to kind of stand up and face the risks that global warming presents and deal with them.

RUBY:

Paddy, thank you for your time and your work on this series.

PADDY:

Thank you Ruby.

RUBY:

That was Paddy Manning, author of the book Body Count, which inspired this series.

You can listen to all three episodes of ‘Climate Change Will Kill You in the 7am podcast feed.

This series was produced by the 7am team.

Field reporting and production by Elle Marsh, in a position supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Additional production by Ruby Schwartz and Cinnamon Nippard.

Brain Campau and Atticus Bastow mixed the show. It was edited by Osman Faruqi. Erik Jensen is our Editor in Chief.

We’ll be back next week, with brand new episodes of our daily news show, 7am.

I’m Ruby Jones - see you then.

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