We have been talking about the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity for years. Disrupted climate, health in dangerpresented on Télé-Québec, turns the camera back to human beings to show how global warming poses risks to our health here in Quebec.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
“Protecting nature and protecting ecosystems is not just about protecting biodiversity, it’s a human health solution,” says Cécile Aenishaenslin, pathologist and microbiologist at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Montreal, in the documentary Disrupted climate, health in danger. His sentence perfectly sums up the purpose of the documentary directed by Sofi Langis and presented Wednesday on Télé-Québec.
The objective here is not so much to remember that the planet is warming as to go on the ground, from Bromont to the ice of Nunavut via Gatineau and Montreal, to see what is changing concretely in Quebec. And for Quebecers.
Sofi Langis’ camera follows step by step the research carried out in the different regions of Quebec, all of which have the same objective: to understand the impacts of global warming on human health in order to better prevent them.
This discourse underlies another: if citizens better understand how they will be affected personally, they will perhaps be even more sensitive to this issue and could exert additional pressure on their elected representatives.
Giant viruses?
The film begins on an ominous note. In the Far North, the team of Professor Alexander Culley, a microbiologist from Laval University, will collect samples of water, ice and permafrost in order to identify the bacteria and viruses found there. The danger, he says, is that long-dormant unknown pathogens could resurface that could affect humans: “giant viruses” and a soup of bacteria released by melting permafrost, one of the effects of which would be to release more greenhouse gases, contributing to an infernal cycle that the planet is already struggling to contain.
A project carried out in Bromont is focusing on a subject that everyone has heard about in recent years: the transmission of Lyme disease by ticks that migrate north as the temperature warms. The idea put forward by Cécile Aenishaenslin’s team is to tackle the problem at the source by treating small rodents such as squirrels, chipmunks and mice, natural reservoirs of the disease, to better prevent transmission to ticks and then to humans.
The need to prevent is at the heart of the research put forward in Disrupted climate, health in danger.
However, even if we feel the desire to stay close to people (in particular by exploring the psychological distress among people who are victims of floods in the Outaouais), the documentary leaves many questions unanswered.
IMAGE FROM CLIMATE DISORDER, HEALTH IN DANGER
Physician Mélissa Généreux, center right, meets with a group of disaster victims who share the emotional and psychological impacts of the floods that have hit the Outaouais in recent years.
Arriving at the end credits, we learn that the treatment of small rodents seems to work, but we have no idea of the results of the research of the team that has gone to collect samples of viruses and bacteria in the Far North. Did they find dangerous pathogens? Agents likely to spread to humans and cause a new form of pandemic? Mystery.
This lack of answers weighs down a film that is sometimes very technical. This documentary, however, has the merit of approaching climate change from a different angle and highlighting doctors like the Dres Mélissa Généreux and Claudel Pétrin-Desrosiers, for whom it is essential not only to take an interest in the impacts of global warming on communities, but also to train young doctors so that they become aware of the environmental factors that will increasingly influence on the health of their patients.
Télé-Québec, Wednesday at 8 p.m.