In warming Great Lakes region, water, heat can be an unhealthy combination | Bridge Michigan

Overhauling Michigan’s infrastructure to better withstand floods will take money, time and policy change. Only last year did the state department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy propose requiring local sewer projects to withstand bigger rainstorms.

But sewers only get replaced once every 50 to 100 years, which means those policy tweaks could take decades to fulfill their goal of reducing flood risks.

And higher-capacity sewers can’t eliminate the threats caused by, say, mosquitoes breeding in backyard kiddie pools or wooded wetlands. 

That’s where health-care providers come in. 

“Health professionals have to be able to think of things that used to be unusual,” said Dr. Lisa DelBuono, president of Michigan Clinicians for Climate Action.

For example, La Crosse encephalitis is so rare — Michigan has had eight reported cases in the past decade — that Gurn’s doctors at first sent him back home from the hospital, he said: “They couldn’t find nothing wrong.”

When he returned with worse symptoms, he went through a battery of tests before a spinal tap identified a mosquito bite as the source of his illness.

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