Doctors know banning fossil fuel ads is a matter of life or death Melissa Lem & Samantha Green | Opinion | March 13th 2024 When health-care professionals joined MP Charlie Angus on stage to announce his private member’s bill to ban advertising for fossil fuels, it came as no surprise. Physicians and health-care workers lead the movement for a tobacco-style ban on fossil fuel advertising. In fact, over 35 health organizations in Canada — representing over 700,000 health-care professionals — called on the federal government to ban fossil fuel advertising nearly two years ago. This is because we see the harm fossil fuel pollution inflicts on our patients’ health first-hand. Countless studies link burning oil and gas to increases in childhood asthma, cancers, worse mental health, adverse pregnancy outcomes and premature death. To us, these statistics are people with names and faces who walk into our clinics each week. Outside the health-care community, Angus’s Bill C-372has drummed up some controversy. This is also no great surprise. We saw resistance from the tobacco industry when the health-care community first proposed banning cigarette advertising. In fact, the parallels with the tobacco fight are uncanny. Like tobacco, fossil fuels are a leading cause of death. Fossil fuel air pollution is responsible forone in seven premature deathsin Canada. These toxic emissions drive higher rates of disease that increase costs in an already overburdened health-care system. Canada now has the world’s highest rate of new childhood asthma cases after Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. When we also take into account fossil fuels’ lead role in driving the climate crisis, their health impacts balloon. In the past few years, Canada has experienced deadly heat waves, wildfire smoke, storms, floods and droughts. As global temperatures continue to rise, people in Canada will experience escalating harm and risks from extreme weather, increased vector-borne disease and other effects of the heating climate. Those at highest risk are children and babies, elderly, disabled, Indigenous and racialized people and those living in poverty.  But like the tobacco industry, oil and gas giants have fought hard to undermine the science linking their products to these deadly effects. Oil and gas companies generated cutting-edge research linking their products to climate change as far back as 1954.....NOW AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH!.....read on   https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/13/opinion/doctors-know-banning-fossil-fuel-ads-matter-life-death