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Linda Fried: From Redefining Aging, to Leading Research on Climate and Health
This story is part of a series celebrating the work of women at the Columbia Climate School, in honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2022. Learn more about the day, and check out our related blog posts. Here.
Linda Fried is the Mailman School of Public Health dean at Columbia University. She has been a pioneer in many programs related to climate and health.
When Dr. Linda P. Fried began her deanship at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public HealthShe set out in 2008 to answer a fundamental question: What factors were going be affecting human health in 21st century? She was a geriatrician, and an epidemiologist. She knew that the challenges facing humanity over the next century would be different than the ones faced in the past century.
After she and her colleagues from the Mailman School performed a lot more scenario modeling, it became clear that climate change would occur. It can have a severe impact on human healthThe near future will be a bright one for the entire world. Fried pointed out that the effects of climate change have made HurricanesThe last 20 years have been more dangerous. Heavy precipitation events can also lead to frequent flooding. This can increase the likelihood of contracting malaria in tropical countries like Thailand. Peru. The increased frequency of major wildfires poses a danger not only to the fires but also to the air quality.
Fried was inspired by the urgency of her initial findings to act. A year later, she launched the nation’s first program on climate and health with her colleagues in the school’s Environmental Health Sciences department. “When we started this program in 2009, most people thought we were talking about science fiction,” said Fried.
Fried was determined, despite the skepticism and lukewarm response. Under her leadership, she has been helping researchers, professors, and students to understand these issues on a deeper level and develop solutions to protect the public’s health in the face of climate change.
Fried started the Mailman School’s Climate and Health ProgramTogether with Joe GrazianoColumbia University’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences chair. They recruited Patrick KinneyThe program is currently led by Dr. Judith Sullivan, an air pollution epidemiologist and associate professor at the school of public health. Today, it is headed by Jeff Shaman.
Fried is proud to share her pride after 14 years of hard work. The school has over 30 faculty members who are studying the complex effects of climate change on public health. Fried and her team were tasked with scaling up the program during a time when climate change was still largely invisible to the public.
Avoiding climate change apathy
While starting out in 2009, Fried said, “One huge challenge was that due to [the politicization of climate science], one of our most important funders, the National Institutes of Health, wouldn’t fund research work on the effects of climate change on health.”
“The inability to get grant funding has kept scientists from being able to work in this area in the past,” she added. “That makes philanthropic funding very critical.”
She observed that until recently, a vast majority of donors have been focusing mainly on mitigating climate change — or reducing and avoiding greenhouse gases emissions —and not as much on climate change adaptation, which includes minimizing the negative impacts of climate change. “It is vital to study adaptation measures for protecting human health and well-being. We have to move to a balanced portfolio of equally investigating mitigation and adaptation,” Fried explained.
Fried and her team had to work hard and take time to get adequate funding. This was frustrating and deeply concerning.
“These are urgent issues that we need to solve. We have the capabilities to solve them but we can’t do it without resources. The resources were not available back then. It’s taken a number of years — and primarily philanthropic support — to build this critical program,” Fried said.
Education about climate change and health must be integrated into the curriculum
Fried started another initiative four years after establishing Climate and Health Program. It would accelerate the pace at which all health care systems were being educated about climate change’s health impacts. This time, the idea came from former President Barack Obama’s special assistant, Alice Hill, who was leading policy development regarding climate change and national security.
The Obama administration realized in 2013 that the health effects of climate change were still being ignored, but that it was urgently needed. Hill approached Fried and suggested that a program be created to educate health care professionals.
Fried was excited by the idea and decided to pitch it at the global climate summit. Paris in 2015. After she presented evidence on the public health effects of climate changes and the need for such an initiative to be taken, the World Health Organization announced the concept as a critical outcome of the Paris Climate Accords.
Despite this response, no one was willing to start the education program. Fried again decided to launch the initiative at Mailman School despite continuing to be limited funding in climate and health.
Rockefeller Foundation grants allowed her to create the Rockefeller Foundation, which would go on to become a world-leading organization called the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education2017 (GCCHE). GCCHE created a curriculum for climate and health courses in 2017 with the assistance of experts from around the globe. These courses are free for schools of health professions that have committed to educating their students about these issues.
Today, more than 240 public health, medical, nursing, and other health professionals’ schools are members of the consortium’s global network. All thanks to the GCCHE’s efforts, each one of them has committed to adding education on the health impacts of climate change to their curriculum.
The Mailman School dean continues to challenge people’s views on public health. However, her journey to becoming a distinguished geriatrician began with the same curiosity.
Venturing into geriatrics
A native New Yorker, Fried earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1970. According to a profile about Fried in the, she worked for five years in various jobs as a paralegal and social worker. New York Times. She went on to pursue an MD degree at the Rush Medical College in Chicago and trained in internal medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center.
“I didn’t plan on going into geriatrics,” she said. She was a trained general internist and epidemiologist. She wanted to concentrate on the prevention of chronic diseases when she became a Johns Hopkins University faculty member in 1985.
She was researching the role of exercise in preventing heart disease. That’s when she met Dr. William R. Hazzard, who had joined Johns Hopkins to work in the field of geriatric medicine. “He said to me one day that I should be a geriatrician,” said Fried. “I told him that, quite frankly, I wasn’t interested because I was excited about the research project I was already working on.”
“But when I looked at the data on aging and life expectancy, it took my breath away,” exclaimed Fried. “In the 20th century, we had done the inconceivable by increasing life expectancy by 30 years — all thanks to public health measures and social investments. It’s unbelievable.”
She realized that it was crucial for researchers to determine if it was possible for the mass to live longer and lead healthier lives. “That was a very compelling question that most people weren’t working on at the time. So, two days later, I changed my career and got into geriatric medicine,” recalled Fried.
She has since published over 500 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and other papers. Frailty was a vague medical term before her research. It was thought to be synonymous with disability or comorbidity, even though the condition is extremely common in old age. By How to define frailtyFried developed a robust assessment instrument to help older adults identify, prevent and treat frailty as a clinical syndrome.
Fried doesn’t see her work in geriatrics as separate from her work on climate change. “Some of the work that I’ve done in defining frailty in aging is now related to how older adults who are frail have diminished abilities to handle extreme weather events,” she explained.
“During heat waves associated with climate change, it is frail older adults who are particularly vulnerable, along with infants. The longer lives that people all over the world are now experiencing require new expertise as to how to keep people healthy throughout their longer lives,” added Fried.
Collaboration between climate scientists, epidemiologists, and other scientists could be enhanced
Fried pointed out that there is an interaction among infectious diseases like COVID-19 frailty, aging and climate change. In public health, the term “syndemic” is used to define different epidemics or health consequences that mutually exacerbate each other.
For example, there is strong evidence that climate changes are causing the global air pollution crisis. Exposure to air pollutants compromises individuals’ hearts, lungs, brains and immune systems and makes them more prone to severe COVID infections. Senior citizens are more susceptible to severe COVID infections, which can lead to higher rates of hospitalizations or fatalities. The additional effects of air pollution could be very serious.
“There are many other possible threats from climate change in terms of affecting life expectancy. It has not been modeled yet but it is still an important potential effect that we need to understand,” she said.
Fried’s future plans are to continue highlighting how climate change is wreaking havoc on people’s lives. This includes coordinating research projects between Columbia Climate School faculty and the Mailman School faculty.
In the past, the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health has been deeply involved with the Earth Institute — now a part of the Columbia Climate School — in studying environmental issues across faculties, Fried reflected. “There is a lot of wonderful history for both the schools to build on,” she said. “It is my anticipation and hope that we can offer strengths to the Columbia Climate School on the health dimensions of climate change, which I think would round out the Climate School quite well.”
