Canadian emergency medicine resident Julia Sawatzky had an eye-opening experience early in her medical training that reshaped her understanding of the climate crisis’s health impact. During a shift in the emergency room amid Canada’s wildfire season, she found herself surrounded by patients with symptoms linked to extreme heat and smoke exposure. Some patients collapsed from heat exhaustion, while others struggled to breathe due to respiratory distress. “Everyone was suffering from the heat or the smoke,” Sawatzky recalled.

Outside the hospital, the heat was intense, and whenever the automatic door opened, smoke billowed in. “That pollution was literally entering the hospital,” she said. The scene underscored the reality that the environmental crisis wasn’t just a topic for news reports o

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