Q & A: Our Weather Man

Meet the physician whose job is to protect the health of our nation against the onslaught of global warming. So what exactly is he doing about it?

From radical roots in community politics, Howard Frumkin has risen to high office. In 1982, as a newly minted doctor specializing in occupational health, he trolled the union halls of Philadelphia, instructing listeners on ways to protect themselves from workplace hazards. His mission these days is no less bold: to protect the health of Americans from the ravages of climate change. On leave from his position as chairman of the department of environmental and occupational health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, he now directs the National Center for Environmental Health's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control. At his office in traffic-choked Atlanta, he spoke to Josie Glausiusz of his plans for an overhaul of government action on climate crises.

Tell us a bit about your early career.
I went to Philadelphia for med school and got involved in some community-based occupational health work at the time. It was clear then that the communities around factories could be affected by conditions in the factories, that pollutants don't respect factory walls. Plumes of smoke move from factories or power plants to nearby communities, and when chemicals are dumped on factory grounds, they can trickle down and get into the groundwater.

In 1990 I came down here to Atlanta. I worked in small towns where factories or hazardous waste sites threatened people's health, and I found it a great joy to try to help people respond. I had a bit of an epiphany almost a decade ago. As I drove around Atlanta interminably, on roads that no kid could ever walk or bike on, and as I looked at these obese people, I realized that as important as chemical threats are to people's health, the built environment poses different kinds of hazards that are probably as important, if not more so.

You've described climate change as "perhaps the largest looming public health challenge that we face." Why do you say that?
Climate change is global in scale. It is vast in its potential impact and it cuts across almost every field in public health, from infectious disease to chronic disease to injuries. And in many senses it's unpredictable, which means we have that much more to prepare for. This is really a problem that is unprecedented in its scope.

What are the impending crises for which we have to prepare?
The potential of climate change to increase severe weather events is alarming. There are heat waves, flooding. We expect air pollutants -- in particular, ozone -- to increase with warming temperatures, and ozone is a trigger of asthma attacks. Airborne allergens will be a potentially greater problem because certain plants that produce spores and allergens do very well with rising temperatures. We have recent evidence that poison ivy, for example, grows more exuberantly and secretes a more dangerous toxin, urushiol, under high carbon dioxide scenarios.

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