Climate Change Could Raise Kidney Stone Risk

New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests an unexpected effect of global warming: a future expansion of the US “kidney stone belt”.

According to the research, increasing global temperatures will result in more cases dehydration and low urine production leading to kidney stones (calcium deposits).

The US already has a “kidney stone belt” in which occurences of the painful condition are twice as common as in the rest of the country. The research predicts:

“The fraction of the U.S. population living in high-risk zones for nephrolithiasis will grow from 40% in 2000 to 56% by 2050, and to 70% by 2095.”

If the research findings are correct then millions of Americans could literally feel the pain of global warming.

Photo Credit: Trevor Blake (Creative Commons)

July 15th, 2008 Posted by trevor | Health | one comment

Floods Threaten US and Europe First

If the polar icecaps continue melting then the sea levels will rise, causing floods. Up until now it had been thought that regions most at risk from the flooding would be tropical islands in the Pacific. However new research suggests that the US and Europe could be hit first.

Computer models run by Detlef Stammer of Hamburg University show that the pattern of flooding is unlikely to be even across the globe. Instead the water from the Greenland ice cap is likely to remain mostly in the Atlantic for almost fifty years. First to be hit by floods will be northern areas such as coastal areas of the US and Europe. In particular, sea-level rises on the East coast of the USA could be 30 times greater than in the Pacific.

That should serve to focus some minds!

July 7th, 2008 Posted by trevor | Environment | no comments