Previously just the worry of climate scientists,
environmentalists, doomsday prognosticators, and gas-price
watchers, climate change is starting to worry some others—
public health specialists, who say that global warming could
affect large swaths of the population. In a paper published in
the journal PLoS Medicine Tuesday, a group of European public
health experts write that climate change could alter "patterns
of physical activity and food availability, and in some cases
[bring] direct physical harm." Slight temperature increases
could also change disease distribution in colder regions and
make hotter regions less hospitable to humans. "Certain
subgroups are at more risk—mainly the young, the old, and the
poor," says Peter Byass, director of the Umea Centre for Global
Health Research in Sweden. "The middle age and wealthy will be
better off. It's a crude way of looking at it, but it's not so
far off the mark." That means more prevalence of diseases that
affect the poor, such as malaria and dengue fever, and