“Howard, who has spent years studying the relationship between our changing climate and human health, highlighted the role of mental health – an issue the multisport club members raised, given the discouragement and frustration they have felt because of wildfire smoke.”

“Howard noted that a study released earlier this month noted that a given level of PM 2.5 from wildfire smoke has worse health outcomes than other forms of PM 2.5, such as those from gas-powered vehicles and industrial emissions.”

“Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency physician based in Yellowknife who treats patients harmed by wildfire smoke, said a new approach to showing the longer health impacts from wildfires is important.”

“Courtney Howard, an emergency physician at Stanton Hospital in Yellowknife and president of the Northwest Territories Medical Association, says climate change is already disrupting healthcare delivery. During the 2023 wildfires, her hospital had to evacuate along with the entire city — something she believes will happen more often in the future.”

“This is simply unacceptable for a level 3 trauma centre,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician in Yellowknife and the president of the medical association — in part, she said, because Stanton serves the entire territory, is a hub for a “structurally disadvantaged population” and has agreements to provide a standard of care to the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut as well.

“Even thinking about this is really scary,” Courtney Howard — an emergency room physician, vice-chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, mother, dancer and writer — tells me from her kitchen overlooking Yellowknife’s Back Bay. Talking about it “helps everybody realize: ‘I’m not alone.’ It normalizes those feelings, and when we normalize and are vulnerable with one another … it actually naturally brings us into the community that we need to solve problems.”

“There’s a weekend in May where we’ve only got one physician currently scheduled for most of the days. We have no idea how we’re going to keep the doors of the emergency department open,” said Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician and president of the NWT Medical Association, last week.

““There is global consensus that climate change is the biggest threat of our to time to both health and health systems,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, a Canadian emergency room physician and vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. He ticked off a long list: heat-related illnesses, worsening asthma, heart diseases worsened by wildfire smoke, changing habit for disease-carrying mosquitoes, ticks and other insects, and crop failures that drive hunger, war and migration.”

““This very much lines up with what we would expect,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, a Canadian emergency room physician and vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. She was not part of the study. “When you think about summertime daytime temperatures in places like Rome — they start to get up into the 40s (104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit)…. That’s very heat stress/heat stroke territory for healthy young people and very dangerous for older people, particularly if they don’t have air conditioning.”

“You feel the anxiety rising as you’re getting farther away from your goal and the crisis points are increasing,” said Howard. “So I think we’re going to need to anticipate increasing anxiety. And what’s that going to do to human behavior on the local and global stage?”

“In a summer during which Canadians have felt the reverberating loss of extreme climate-related events near them, it is increasingly clear that immediate, coordinated strategies are needed to overcome the climate emergency.”

“Dr Courtney Howard is an Emergency Physician in Yellowknife, and is a nationally- and globally-recognized expert on the impacts of climate change on health, and in the broader field of planetary health.”

by Dr Courtney Howard, Dr Nicole Redvers and Dr Sarah Cook

“I research wildfires and health, so I have been keeping close tabs on the situation, speaking with practitioners and the media, ever since May.”

“On Aug. 2, 2014, six weeks into the wildfire season that would come to be known as the Summer of Smoke, we woke up to haze over Back Bay in Yellowknives Dene territory. It was my daughter Vivi’s first birthday and we’d planned a party in the park.”

“The intersection of environment and health is a powerful sweet spot where our efforts can yield outsized positive impacts on our lives now and into the future.”

“But when the AQHI is at 10+, it’s really best for everyone to try to stay indoors as much as possible with the windows closed, said Dr. Courtney Howard, a Yellowknife-based emergency physician who looks at the health impacts of wildfires. “

“On the heels of COP27 and as delegates debate the biodiversity crisis at COP15 in Montreal, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, flooding and air pollution from forest fires continue to intensify in Canada.”

“Climate change is causing global insecurity across sectors and worsening health outcomes, and a new report from The Lancet cautions putting “health at the mercy of fossil fuels.”

“Both Wilson and emergency room physician and professor of medicine at the University of Calgary Dr. Courtney Howard, who wasn’t part of the study, said report authors are correct to call the problem an addiction to fossil fuels, similar to being addicted to harmful drugs.”

“Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new…”

“Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician in Yellowknife, said it was an important decision that gave residents a space to exercise and socialize after a month of being told to limit outdoor activity and to keep windows closed because the air quality was poor.”

“A federal plan to release treated tailings overlooks large gaps in our understanding of how that could affect human health, some experts and advocates say.”