You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Today I want to introduce you to Renée Salis.

She's an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

There was a patient I saw who was a young girl who came in with an asthma attack and it was her third one that week.

And her mom was just beside herself trying to figure out how to protect her daughter.

For Dr. Salis treating this girl meant seeing the problem through a lens that might surprise you.

Climate change. During the initial discussions I hadn't really realized that pollen levels were higher because of climate change.

And that's something that we've covered here on Shortwave before.

The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more pollen that's produced.

Towards the end of the visit I recognize that and we talk through that.

And I think by me making that diagnosis of recognizing that higher pollen levels were contributing to why her daughter wasn't able to keep her disease under control,

it allowed us to develop a treatment plan directed at that.

And what did that look like?

Well Dr. Salis talked to the girls mother about checking pollen levels online or through an app to decide whether her daughter should go and play outside.

Or whether to install an air filtration system in order to keep pollen outside of the home.

Or to make sure that the home is optimally weatherized.

And I think also recognizing that these are treatments.

And so we as doctors need to think about prescribing these for our patients because not everyone can afford them.

And so we have to make sure that everyone has these because this is how we protect health in the air of climate change.

Today on the show more with Dr. Salis about her work at the intersection of climate change and health.

And how she envisions a new healthcare system that takes climate change into account.

I'm Rita Tateji, you're listening to Short Brave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.

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