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. 2013 Apr 25;8(4):e62041.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062041. Print 2013.

The effectiveness of public health interventions to reduce the health impact of climate change: a systematic review of systematic reviews

Maha Bouzid  1 , Lee Hooper, Paul R Hunter
Affiliations

The effectiveness of public health interventions to reduce the health impact of climate change: a systematic review of systematic reviews

Maha Bouzid et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Background: Climate change is likely to be one of the most important threats to public health in the coming years. Yet despite the large number of papers considering the health impact of climate change, few have considered what public health interventions may be of most value in reducing the disease burden. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of public health interventions to reduce the disease burden of high priority climate sensitive diseases.

Methods and findings: For each disease, we performed a systematic search with no restriction on date or language of publication on Medline, Web of Knowledge, Cochrane CENTRAL and SCOPUS up to December 2010 to identify systematic reviews of public health interventions. We retrieved some 3176 records of which 85 full papers were assessed and 33 included in the review. The included papers investigated the effect of public health interventions on various outcome measures. All interventions were GRADE assessed to determine the strength of evidence. In addition we developed a systematic review quality score. The interventions included environmental interventions to control vectors, chemoprophylaxis, immunization, household and community water treatment, greening cities and community advice. For most reviews, GRADE showed low quality of evidence because of poor study design and high heterogeneity. Also for some key areas such as floods, droughts and other weather extremes, there are no adequate systematic reviews of potential public health interventions.

Conclusion: In conclusion, we found the evidence base to be mostly weak for environmental interventions that could have the most value in a warmer world. Nevertheless, such interventions should not be dismissed. Future research on public health interventions for climate change adaptation needs to be concerned about quality in study design and should address the gap for floods, droughts and other extreme weather events that pose a risk to health.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: PRH was chair of the science advisory committee of Suez Environment until 2010. The authors have declared that no other competing interests exist. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Flow diagram describing paper selection and inclusion/exclusion process according to PRISMA guidelines.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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