Claim that ‘climate change is the cholera of our era’ ridiculed as ‘load of garbage’ by renowned disease expert

A May 25, 2009 article in the UK Times warning that “climate change is the cholera of our era” has raised the ire of an internationally known disease expert formerly of the UN IPCC.

“The article is a rehash of a similar load of garbage unloaded in 1996, plus (identical wording) other writings of the past, including, I suspect, IPCC,” Dr. Paul Reiter told Climate Depot. Reiter is a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control.

The UK Times article, by Professor Sir Muir Gray is Public Health Director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, alleges that man-made global warming is a greater threat to mankind than the scourge of cholera — an acute diarrheal illness– which killed an nearly 3000 people in Zimbabwe alone earlier this year. A May 26, 2009 article from VOA reveals cholera cases are expected to reach 100,000 in Zimbabwe alone.

Muir wrote in the UK Times: “In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era — fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution.”

“Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change’s threat to health,” Muir added.

But Reiter, was blunt in his rebuttal to Muir’s article in the UK Times.

“They have cherry picked without remorse. I have huge response to my article in Malaria Journal. Yet these peddlers of garbage quote a 1998 model by two activists whose work is ridiculed by those of us who work in this field,” Reiter continued. “What the hell can we do? I am flabbergasted that this can go on, and on, and on,” Reiter, who is featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists of man-made global warming, concluded.

Reiter was also formerly with the UN IPCC and was so appalled at UN IPCC process that he threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reports.

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