Does Climate Change Cause Drug Shortages? - Bloomberg
Does Climate Change Cause Drug Shortages? - Bloomberg
How a Hurricane Might Rip Through Your Medicine Cabinet
An overturned storage unit following Hurricane Fiona in Salinas, Puerto Rico. Photographer: Gabriella N. Baez/Bloomberg
Hi, it’s Ashleigh in London. With the warmest January on record just behind us, I’ve been talking to people about how climate change is going to reshape drugs, how we store them and the drug industry. But first...
A tornado that ripped through Pfizer’s plant in North Carolina raising fears about further drug shortages; a hurricane that halted operations at an AstraZeneca facility in Puerto Rico; Cyclone Freddy that washed away antiretroviral drugs and mosquito nets in Malawi. Those are just three examples of how climate change is increasingly impacting medicine supply chains. And according to all climatic projections, it’s only going to get worse.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.