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CASSANDRA: nice name, isn’t it? Its original bearer lived a tragic life, though. She was, they say, drop-dead gorgeous, so much so that a god fell for her – and that’s always bad news for the human.
The daughter of Priam and Hecuba, King and Queen of Troy, poor Cassandra got the gift of prophecy from Apollo – and then, when she wouldn’t give in to his seduction tactics, he spat in her mouth (nice one, Apollo!) so that no one ever believed anything she prophesied.
And she had a lot to soothsay about; she warned everyone of trouble ahead when Paris came swanning back to Troy with Helen in tow (y’know, Helen of Troy, ja, the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships… sounds like a cosmetic ad now, but it was a war, with battleships and an army determined to take Helen back to her Greek husband by force).
Cassie was helluva suspicious of the Wooden Horse – if the Trojans had listened to her, the Greeks would never have been able to sneak into Troy as they did. Ultimately Cassandra was murdered by the Greek leader’s wife. (Try reading some of the ancient Greek plays sometime – it’s pretty raw stuff.)
To this day, anyone whose prophecies of doom are not believed gets called a Cassandra. The label has become very personal for some scientists researching climate change over the last decade or so – their work has made them the target of some serious, personally damaging and highly stressful attacks.
So you’d perhaps expect a little Schadenfreude (“a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people,” Merriam Webster) now that the impact of climate change is right here, in our faces; now that the long warned-off feedback mechanisms seem to be doing that quantum-leap thing, increasing climate change dangers and unpredictability.
Look at this graph showing the extent of global sea ice as measured over 40 years (years which included the extreme El Niños of 1982 and 1997, as well as 2016), follow the red line (2016/7) and you’ll see clearly and vividly that something extraordinary happened in this last season.
Except that the scientists are not rejoicing at being right. Because as we’ve seen in southern Africa, the evidence of climate change arrives in the form of suffering – usually for the most vulnerable groups of people.
Here’s just one example that should be on the radar of public health officials, one with serious implications for us in South Africa: Mesoamerican nephropathy (aka chronic kidney disease, basically kidney failure), which has killed about 20 000 mainly young, otherwise healthy men in countries like Costa Rica, Nicaragua and El Salvador. It’s been around for a while, but in quite small numbers; the pace of mortality has picked up markedly in recent years, in tandem with changes in climatic conditions.
“Clinically, the disease presents primarily in men working manually in the sugarcane fields, but it has also been observed in other groups that work manually outdoors, such as construction workers, subsistence farmers, and other similar groups of people… Blood pressure may be slightly high, but not at levels (>160 mm Hg) commonly associated with renal progression.
"Most strikingly, the disease does not appear to be due to any of the common causes of end-stage renal disease, such as diabetes, hypertension, glomerulonephritis, or polycystic kidney disease.”
That’s because it’s caused by recurrent dehydration as a consequence of the collision of increased daytime temperatures due to climate change with inadequate working conditions – one scientist noted that dehydration must follow if adequate water supplies are not provided on the job. This may be one of the first major diseases directly attributed to climate change, the scientists write.
Here in South Africa, we already have an epidemic of diabetes and hypertension, conditions closely linked to kidney problems. On top of that, we have a neat climate feature that means we’ll get – that we are already getting – around twice the temperature increase that temperate regions such as Europe can expect (see Dr Francois Engelbrecht and colleagues' published work).
In the throes of the heatwaves here in Gauteng (and the recent days when temps surged up towards the 40 degree mark in the Western Cape), during this punishing summer of 2016/17, I’ve been noting just how many of our workers are doing manual labour during the worst daytime heat: construction workers, gardeners, handymen like plumbers, roadworkers, people like telecoms workers and metro police, my NGO friends working with township animal welfare, wastepickers, the car guards at shopping malls, security personnel…
With a public health service already stretched thin as it can go, how would we cope with a new epidemic of collapsing kidneys among young breadwinners? (End stage kidney disease requires dialysis, expensive treatment already in short supply in our health facilities.)
Employers need to ensure that they are factoring this in to their working conditions: are you supplying water in adequate quantities? Are you ensuring that workers drink enough (and have access to rehydration salts if need be)? Is there shade/air-conditioned shelter available? Are workers taking long lunch hours and working into the evening rather than during the worst daytime heat?
And this is just one snapshot of the potential impact on how we do work in a changing climate. No wonder the Cassandras aren’t happy to see their prophecies becoming real…
* Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
