World Health Day: Health and Climate Change
Today is World Health Day 2008. The World Health Organization has announced that this year's theme is" protecting health from climate change."
World Health Day, on 7 April, marks the founding of the World Health Organization and is an opportunity to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health each year. In 2008, World Health Day focuses on the need to protect health from the adverse effects of climate change.The theme “protecting health from climate change” puts health at the centre of the global dialogue about climate change. WHO selected this theme in recognition that climate change is posing ever growing threats to global public health security.
Through increased collaboration, the global community will be better prepared to cope with climate-related health challenges worldwide. Examples of such collaborative actions are: strengthening surveillance and control of infectious diseases, ensuring safer use of diminishing water supplies, and coordinating health action in emergencies.
Today, on our blog, we'd like to draw attention to a new invention by Dean Kamen that is a very promising innovation to provide safe drinking water in areas of the world that are experiencing drought as a result of climate change.
One person in six lives without regular access to safe drinking water, and more than twice as many lack access to adequate sanitation, according to the United Nations. Water-related diseases kill a child every eight seconds, and are responsible for 80 percent of all easily preventable illnesses and deaths in the developing world. These alarming statistics have not escaped Dean Kamen's attention.
The entrepreneur and quixotic inventor best known for the heavily hyped (and somewhat disappointing) Segway scooter has been working on what he promises will be a revolutionary new water purifier. Dubbed the Slingshot, Kamen's washing machine-sized device produces 10 gallons of clean water an hour on 500 watts of electricity. It uses heat to distill water—boil it, condense it and recycle the energy. The heat that it uses is captured from a new type of generator that, you guessed it, he's also invented. NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker spoke with Kamen about his mission to bring light and water to the world's poorest.
Click here to read excerpts of the NEWSWEEK interview.
Dean Kamen's water purifier was recognized as a "runner up" among the Coolest Inventions of 2003 selected by Time Magazine. Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA, has registered a number of patents for this invention and others.
If you'd like to see a video of Dean Kamen's Miracle Water Distiller,code-named Slingshot, check out this video clip from Kamen's appearance on The Colbert Report.
