BARCELONA (AlertNet) - Health problems ranging from heat stroke to malnutrition to depression are set to worsen around the world as climate change takes hold, international health officials warned on Tuesday.

More money and better coordination of information will be needed to help governments and health workers ward off the worst threats and cope with a heavier burden of illness, they said.

"We will be on the front line and we will need enough resources to deal with that," said Roberto Bertollini, a doctor and coordinator of public health and the environment for the World Health Organisation.

He warned that climate change could boost the incidence of heat-related diseases including diarrhoea and salmonella, expand the range of mosquitoes that carry dengue fever and malaria and exacerbate shortages of food and clean water. It could also increase stress, depression and displacement as families suffer through more extreme weather, including storms, floods and droughts.

Studies suggest there may even be a few new threats, such as nutritional deficiencies arising when communities switch from traditional staple foods to growing new crops better suited to tolerate drought or flooding.

"Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century," Lancet, a leading medical journal, said in a May report.

International negotiators are working in Barcelona this week to prepare a new global climate change pact designed to be adopted at a key climate gathering in Copenhagen in December. However, delays in the process and a lack of firm commitments to greenhouse gas reductions by key emitting countries, particularly the United States, mean a deal now may not be finalised until next year, analysts say.

RISE IN WEATHER-RELATED DISASTERS

Health issues so far have not played a major part in the negotiations, which worries international health officials. The talks have, however, focused on creating a multi-billion-dollar fund to help poorer nations adapt to the effects of climate change.

Today, weather-related disasters kill over 60,000 people a year, and poor nutrition kills another 3.5 million, Bertollini said. Those numbers are likely to rise in the face of climate change, he and others said.

Hospital admissions for diarrhoea in Peru, for instance, have already been shown to rise 8 percent for each additional degree of temperature rise in hot periods, Bertollini said.

Some of the biggest drivers of increased health problems will be variations in water availability, more extreme weather and changes in the distribution of diseases carried by pests like mosquitoes, said Bhupinder Tomar, a senior disaster preparedness officer with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

The federation, which has been looking for answers to the growing problems in the 40 countries where it piloted a preparedness for climate change programme, believes better forecasting and warning systems, combined with better information-sharing by agencies, could help ease expected hikes in diseases.

Often, government weather agencies have accurate long-term forecasts of droughts which aren't necessarily turned into warnings for farmers, he said. Similarly, health agencies often fail to get useful health surveillance data out of their computers and into the hands of policy makers, public or private.

"Partnership is the missing link, in our experience," Tomar said. "Often the solutions exist right there."

Governments preparing for climate change could also get substantial health payoffs by improving early warning systems for weather and health threats, focusing on improving food production yields, adapting pest-control programmes and putting in place regulations to prevent the international spread of diseases, Bertollini said.

France, for instance, developed a heat wave warning system for its large cities following more than 14,000 deaths during a period of intense heat in the summer of 2003. Similar temperatures in recent years have produced far fewer deaths.

But for now, in most places, "the distance between commitment (to moving on these issues) and action is still pretty broad," Bertollini said.

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