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Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, blames climate change for the sinking feeling she had so often in the ER.

“I often feel like I’m in the emergency department pulling patients out of a river, only to see many more behind,” she told STAT’s Sarah Owermohle on Thursday at the STAT Summit in Boston. “So I started walking upstream to find what is causing patients to fall in the river in the first place. And I found that the burning of fossil fuel’s producing pollution, especially air pollution, that’s causing disease.”

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Even though transportation and environment and infrastructure and supply chain and medicine seem to be separate sectors of the economy, they all affect each other. In particular, they affect people’s health, especially the most vulnerable, Salas said.

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