Climate change promoting spread of diseases
As if more intense hurricanes and worse floods weren't enough to concern ourselves with, there is also evidence showing global warming is damaging the health of the world's population through disease.
A recent study by a team of 63 doctors, public health officials and scientists from around the world and published in the British medical journal Lancet shows that cases of dengue fever have doubled every decade since 1990 and the number of cases of Lyme disease in the U.S. have tripled over the last 20 years. Since mosquitoes and ticks flourish in warmer weather, the rise in these diseases isn't surprising. Respiratory diseases also increase in a warmer climate. The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine reports that for every increase of one degree centigrade there is a 1 to 3 percent increase in all causes of death but a 6 percent increase in people with respiratory diseases.
In spite of the evidence that global warming is already harming people (and 2017 is going down as the hottest year on record), the United States is the only country in the world to refuse to sign the Paris Climate Accord, the only country whose leaders insist that global warming doesn't exist, in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Is this good leadership? I don't think so.
Mary Elsie Marchant
Winslow
Concerns about direction of nation, world
I am not quite old enough to have read and understood, contemporaneously, the news from Europe, especially the news from and about Germany, in the decade leading up to World War II. I'm not a historian, but I have studied history (thanks to my high school history teacher Sarah Elizabeth Haynes!) and consider myself to be reasonably well read. I am concerned about the direction our great country (and the world) seems to be moving.
Two brief articles in the Nov. 7 Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette I find illustrative and disturbing are:
1) From the front-page "In the News"section, Juli Briskman was fired for giving a presidential motorcade the finger.
2) From Page 2, Tom Steyer's presidential name calling for his ad "calling for Congress to impeach President Trump." I see parallels between what is going on here, and what I have read and heard, contemporaneously and not, of the rise of bad, even evil governments, in what we have considered third-world countries.
I am encouraged by writings such as Mike Masterson's beautiful Nov. 7 column, "Those Who Stood," and by accounts of those who stand, civilian and military, for the freedoms guaranteed to citizens of the United States of America, by our Constitution.
Charles W. Taunton
Fayetteville
Commentary on 11/14/2017