• Question: How will the population increase effect our health in the future

    Asked by martha to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 17 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      A very interesting question. It’s hard to say what our increased population would lead to and whether we would still have such a difference in quality of life in the future as we have today.

      Overall you’d expect there to be a lot more pollution, a lot less space and we’d be living a lot closer together. Living very close together means that diseases can spread quite quickly through everyone in that group, so chances are we could have some huge pandemics (pandemics is when one infection essentially starts infecting the whole world at once).

      From the pollution, it’s a good question on what that would do to us. In my centre, people work on diesel fumes and cigarette smoke, both of these have an incredible number of nasties in them that make it hard for you to breathe, but they also make your fighter cells different. Turns out they change the way they react, meaning that you generally can’t fight off viruses or bacteria as well, but have more of a chance of allergy or asthma.

      I hope that helps answer your question a bit, let me know if anything isn’t clear or if you have any other questions.

    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      That’s a good question. There are so many ways that population increase will affect health. Infectious diseases will increase, CO2 will increase leading to climate change at an ever faster rate, increased pressure on fresh water and food supplies. To be honest, it’s a pretty grim prosepct. We need to find a way to control population growth. Oh hang on, we already have – allow women control over their reproduction. Simple but true.

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