Climate Change, Infectious Diseases and Health: Connecting the Dots

By Cecile Lantican

April 23, 2012

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Our site visit was hosted by the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development (MCD), a local non-government organization that works on community livelihood, sustainable coastal development, and marine conservation. The focus of providing a livelihood to the community was to reduce the people’s encroachment on the mangrove ecosystem, practice of unsustainable fishing, and eventually protection of the aquatic and marine life.

Our first stop was the Ecolife Café, a restaurant that was aimed to boost ecotourism and serve as an information center for tourists and a venue to interact with the community and learn about local culture. It is a place where community people display their singing talents and folk songs.

After dinner, we were entertained by the community cultural group with their songs and dances. While watching the show, I was thinking that this could be a good channel to reach out and deliver messages to village people about being prepared for climate adaptation. I was reminded of the community theater employed by FHI 360 in Cambodia under the USAID AI.BCC project to raise awareness of H5N1 outbreaks in remote villages.

The restaurant featured two small open racks located in opposite corners of the hall. The racks contained reading materials, such as brochures, about Xuan Thuy national park, MCD activities, and maps of the district, both in English and Vietnamese.

I did not see any low literacy material with core messages about the impact of climate change on people’s health.

We went to Mr. Hoe's private bonsai tree farm, one of the 24 livelihood projects assisted by MCD. The farm was adjacent to a swamp, a small tributary of the Red River Delta, frequented by ducks, geese and wild birds. We stayed at the farm until 6:00 in the afternoon and watched hundreds of birds flying so densely they darkened the sky. We joined the foreign students who came on bicycles, also to watch the birds.

My group mates were happy with this experience, however, not even one of them, including the MCD staff, had a sense that “wild birds are important to public health because they carry emerging zoonotic pathogens. Wild birds are recognized as an ancestral host of avian viruses and influenza A viruses.”

In the past AI.BCC project, Nam Dinh was one of the targeted provinces that experienced outbreaks in ducks in 2006 and 2010.

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