Health care is coming to grips with its pollution problem
An ambulance drives down a road in Brooklyn on December 1st, 2020, in New York City. | Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Pollution from the health care industry is harming the communities it serves, says a study published today in the journal Health Affairs. If you count up how many fewer healthy years people in the US lived as a result of all the pollution the industry pumped out in 2018, it would add up to a collective sum of 388,000 years, the research found. That’s similar to the number of years of life lost due to preventable medical errors.
“I feel like I’m putting a bandaid on a bullet wound,” says Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician and lead author of another article also published in Health Affairs today that urges health care policymakers to consider the threats posed by climate change.
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