Climate change and infectious diseases - a partnership made in hell?

BioMedCentral
August 30, 2019
By Srimathy Sriskantharajah completed a BSc in Microbiology (UCL) and a PhD in environmental microbiology/ atmospheric chemistry (Royal Holloway University of London) before joining BioMed Central. Srimathy blogs about microbiology, infectious diseases and the environment amongst other things.

Our future could very well play out like an apocalyptic Hollywood film, if two of our nemeses get together: climate change and infectious diseases. We have seen this partnership before, as climatic changes have occurred throughout history, and we are seeing already the (re)emergence of infectious diseases due to the effects of current climatic changes. What can we expect in the future? Can we predict what disease outbreaks we may come across AND prepare for them?

...Well, the spread of many bacterial and viral diseases is influenced by where their vectors (carriers, who do not themselves suffer from the infectious diseases) are to be found. Extreme weather events and warmer temperatures mean that water-borne and insect-borne pathogens have migrated further than where they were normally found. In the aftermath of hurricane Florence in North and South Carolina back in 2018 there were huge swarms of mosquitoes in the states – flooded streets became a haven for them. The mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus spread to wider geographic regions fueled by warmer temperatures, as Madeline Thomson, University of Columbia, explained in her interview with On Health.

So, what is next?
We know that there will be more outbreaks of current diseases, new emerging disease threats and the re-emergence of those threats we thought we had eliminated – this seems to be an inescapable future. What we do not know is what, when or where these will be... there are so many risk factors contributing to the potential for outbreaks. Add to this the rising political instability across the world, and it seems a concerted global effort may be difficult to coordinate.

More here ,not a very long article.
http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2019/08/30/climate-change-and-infectious-diseases-a-partnership-made-in-hell/