ROME, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- The United States has accepted that climate change affects human health, Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin said Monday at the end of a Group of Seven (G7) summit of health ministers.
This outcome is important because the U.S. has decided to pull out of the 2016 Paris Agreement to curb climate change.
The Italy-chaired two-day summit of health ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.S., and Britain kicked off Sunday in Milan, the country's financial capital.
Its focus was climate change and how increasingly frequent extreme events such as heat waves, drought, torrential rainfall and floods affect human beings and the animals on which many of us depend.
"We have reached a shared conclusion," Italian news agency ANSA cited Lorenzin as saying at the close of the summit.
"We drew up a document which recalls the position of the U.S., which however accepted the impact of climate-related factors on human health."
Also on Monday, Assistant Director-General for Family, Women's and Children's Health Flavia Bustreo told ANSA that the G7 health ministers have allocated 2 billion euros (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 2018 to a fund for women's and children's health.
The fund has three objectives -- to reduce global maternal mortality from 300,000 such deaths a year, to cut down infant mortality from the current 5.6 million deaths a year, and to bring down adolescent deaths, which currently number one million a year.
Teenage deaths are mostly due to car crashes, early pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases, Bustreo added.
A copy of the final declaration of the G7 health summit was still unavailable at this writing, the Italian Health Ministry told Xinhua.
