As the experts debate the climates’ present and future trends locally and globally, the question of what it all means for human health crops up.  Tropical disease can creep into sub tropical zones with a rise of mean temperature and extreme weather conditions can cause quite acute health concerns for us but day to day how do seasonal weather changes affect us?

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) weather conditions have been considered relevant to human health for many centuries, not just in broad terms for everybody but for individuals too. This is obvious to some extent in the preferences that we as indivuals have for hot or cold, humid or dry and moving (wind) or still air. In TCM wind is referred as the “spear-head of all disease”, in TCM theory the wind is believed to cause colds and flu’s which somewhat stands to reason when we think about how viruses, bacteria, spores, pollens and particle pollution are swept up into the air by wind and are therefore much easier for us to breath in.

Wind was also thought to make people and even animals more aggressive, unpredictable and impatient, this is because wind is considered to be a “Yang” (male-like) force so something already quite Yang like a  man, a child or a dog becomes too Yang and over excited whereas women tend to like the wind more because they are usually not as Yang to begin with.

Ask any primary school teacher what they think of windy days and you will see them roll there eyes and tell you how unruly the kids can get on those days. My father when he was a boy living on a farm would set rabbit snares of a night time with his brothers and they always would catch more rabbits on a windy night because the rabbits seemed to run around more. Dogs seem to yap more too. In the Sahara being constantly buffetted by the Sirroc (strong seasonal winds) for days on end are said to at times drive men mad.

Women in TCM are generally considered to be more adversely effected by stints of damp weather rather than the wind*(unless a woman’s energy type is considered to be more “wooden”), digestive concerns tend to be more prevalent during rainy spells. An extreme example of too much rain is severe gastric and cholera in flood conditions.

Women in many cultures are considered to be more lunar and water like (emotional) than men are, the length of the lunar year is even the same length as the menstrual cycle. Women tend to suffer from fluid retention more than men do and feel less energised when it is wet than men do. Dampness tends to slow people in their thinking as well as their actions, even flies are easier to swat when there is high humidity in the air. As we age our climate preferences become stronger because our resistance to what doesn’t agree with us lessens.

You may have heard about a well known health study that concluded “feeling cold” doesn’t “give you a cold” Adding wind to the equation may have changed the conclusion.

It is relatively easier to spot potential safety hazards in a place like a building site than say a shopping centre for instance. On a construction site you might be hit by a falling object, become a falling object yourself, get injured by malfunctioning equipment,  have years of breathing in demolition dust or have something non-lethal like industrial deafness. Many die and are seriously injured every year in construction accidents.

The truth is that potential occupational health and safety hazards exist in all work places. Take sick -building- syndrome (SBS) for instance, a big part of SBS is inefficient and contaminated air conditioning systems, after about 20 years they  become very difficult if not impossible to keep bacteria and virus free. Buildings are literally constructed around air conditioning systems, to fully replace such a system can be enormously expensive which can make it completely impractical even if it is possible.

The main air con shafts that movie stars crawl through in action flicks divide into many narrower ribbed ducted tributaries that service smaller spaces- quite impossible to get in there and clean. Nowhere is this more serious than in our hospitals, infection control gets progressively more difficult mainly for this reason. Health ministers are either averse to publicly acknowledge this or more worryingly, they might not even know.

How many of us work in air conditioned buildings?

Some OH&S statistics are quite shocking and surprising, did you know nurses are more likely to get assaulted than police in their place of work?, particularly in casualty units on Friday and Saturday nights by drunk patients. Then their are stress issues affecting your health at work, during the implementation phase of the GST workers at the Taxation Office took record levels of stress leave because of the changes. More soldiers have died from suicide after returning from Afghanistan than who actually died in the field fighting because of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Occupational health and safety hazards take many forms.

I ponderered on numerous occassions what the healthiest occupation might be and I thought that being a Yoga teacher would go close, doing Yoga all day- what could be healthier than that? I thought that right up until I treated a Yoga teacher who told me that the yoga was fine but going around to each student trying to correct their technique was often quite difficult because of the awkward postures she would often find herself in doing this, especially in beginners classes.

If you do any job long enough and apply yourself to it, in some way it can undermine your health.

We have come a long way since child miners died of black lung and asbestos workers were expected to toil without protective gear but our new jobs have new OH&S challenges and we cannot rely on the workers compensation system to protect our interests like we used to. Changes to the Work Cover act several years ago has made compensation for work place injury and illness much harder than it once was, we really do have to take care of ourselves in the work place.