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Impact of climate change on human infectious diseases: Empirical evidence and human adaptation

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Impact of climate change on human infectious diseases: Empirical evidence and human adaptation

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The main idea of the Science Direct article is that climate change and air pollution are closely linked and have major impacts on human health. The article explains how climate change affects the spread of diseases, and how air pollution can increase the risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease. It also highlights how climate change and air pollution disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color.

To support this main idea, the article provides several examples of how climate change and air pollution are linked. It explains how global warming and changes in precipitation patterns can increase the range and distribution of disease-carrying vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks and rodents, increasing the likelihood of disease transmission. Additionally, it highlights how air pollution can increase the risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease by worsening asthma and bronchitis, exacerbating heart and lung diseases, and increasing the risk of stroke and heart attack.

The article also emphasizes the importance of taking action to address climate change and air pollution. It argues that reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution are crucial to improve public health and reduce the risk of disease. The article provides guidance for policymakers and public health officials to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change and air pollution on health.

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Impact of climate change on human infectious diseases: Empirical evidence and human adaptation

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Climate change refers to long-term shifts in weather conditions and patterns of extreme weather events. It may lead to changes in health threat to hum...

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How Climate Change is Exacerbating the Spread of Disease

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How Climate Change is Exacerbating the Spread of Disease

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The main idea of the article from Climate.columbia.edu is that climate change is exacerbating the spread of disease and it is crucial to understand this relationship in order to develop effective strategies to reduce the impact of these diseases on public health.

To support this main idea, the article explains how global warming and changes in precipitation patterns can increase the range and distribution of disease-carrying vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks and rodents, increasing the likelihood of transmission. Additionally, it highlights how the changes in temperature and precipitation patterns can alter the seasonality of disease transmission, making it harder to predict and control. The article also mentions that climate change can create new opportunities for the emergence of new diseases through changes in ecosystems, animal and human behavior, and population movement.

The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the relationship between climate change and the spread of disease, in order to develop effective strategies to reduce the impact of these diseases on public health. It also highlights the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions as a way to mitigate the future impact of climate change on human health, which is presented as a key strategy for preventing and mitigating the impacts of climate change on infectious diseases, by reducing the range and survival of disease vectors, altering the timing of seasonal transmission, and reducing the likelihood of emergence of new diseases.

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How Climate Change Is Exacerbating the Spread of Disease

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Contagious diseases are on the rise as a result of climate change and other rapid environmental and social changes. A number of climate-sensitive diseases are expected to worsen with higher temperatures and more extreme weather.

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How Climate Change Is Exacerbating the Spread of Disease

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How Climate Change is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease

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How Climate Change is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease

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The main idea of the ProPublica article is that climate change is having a significant and detrimental impact on the spread of infectious diseases in the United States, and that efforts to combat this threat have been inadequate.

To support this main idea, the article explains how climate change is allowing disease-carrying vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to expand their range and reproduce more, leading to an increase in transmission of diseases. It also highlights how climate change is altering the seasonal transmission of certain diseases, making them harder to predict and control. Furthermore, it explains how climate change is creating new opportunities for the emergence of new diseases by changing the distribution of certain species and altering ecosystems.

The article also highlights the fact that climate change exacerbates existing health disparities, with low-income communities and communities of color being disproportionately impacted. It emphasizes that infectious disease experts and public health officials have been raising the alarm over the impacts of climate change on health for decades, yet efforts to combat this threat have been inadequate. The article provides examples of how climate change has contributed to an increase of specific diseases and illnesses such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus.

Finally, it is argued that while federal funding for research and preparedness is important, it is not sufficient and greater efforts from government and the private sector are needed to address the issue. The article emphasizes the importance of prevention and mitigation of the effects of climate change through reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and on the importance of treating climate change as a public health emergency and taking action to address it.

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The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.

Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people - especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds - has skyrocketed. A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.

The diseases may have always been there, buried deep in wild and remote places out of reach of people. But until now, the planet's natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.

Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.

Aaron Bernstein, the interim director for the C-Change Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.

"Nature is trying to tell us something," Bernstein said.

Scientists have not suggested that climate played any direct role in causing the current COVID-19 outbreak. Though the virus is believed to have originated with the horseshoe bat, part of a genus that's been roaming the forests of the planet for 40 million years and thrives in the remote jungles of south China, even that remains uncertain.

Scientists have, however, been studying the coronaviruses of southern China for years and warning that swift climate and environmental change there - in both loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization - was going to help new viruses jump to people.

There are three ways climate influences emerging diseases. Roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals - including those pressured by diversity loss - and roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings. Vector-borne diseases - those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people - are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion. Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from a frozen reindeer in 2016, which can come down from the arctic and haunt us from the past.

Thus the COVID-19 pandemic, even as it unfolds in the form of an urgent crisis, is offering a larger lesson. It is demonstrating in real time the enormous and undeniable power that nature has over civilization and even over its politics. That alone may make the pandemic prologue for more far-reaching and disruptive changes to come. But it also makes clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks, or, as Bernstein put it, the notion that climate and health and environmental policy might not be related is "a ​dangerous delusion."

The warming of the climate is one of the principal drivers of the greatest - and fastest - loss of species diversity in the history of the planet, as shifting climate patterns force species to change habitats, push them into new regions or threaten their food and water supplies. What's known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems. As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.

The casualties are amplified by civilization's relentless push into forests and wild areas on the hunt for timber, cropland and other natural resources. Epidemiologists tracking the root of disease in South Asia have learned that even incremental and seemingly manageable injuries to local environments - say, the construction of a livestock farm adjacent to stressed natural forest - can add up to outsized consequences.

Around the world, according to the World Resources Institute, only 15% of the planet's forests remain intact. The rest have been cut down, degraded or fragmented to the point that they disrupt the natural ecosystems that depend on them. As the forests die, and grasslands and wetlands are also destroyed, biodiversity sharply decreases further. The United Nations warns that the number of species on the planet has already dropped by 20% and that more than a million animal and plant species now face extinction.

Losing species has, in certain cases, translated directly to a rise in infectious disease.

Peatland fires in Indonesia in 2018 used to clear forests for palm oil plantations. Deforestation is one of the largest drivers of the emergence of new infectious diseases. (Wahyudi/AFP via Getty Image)

Americans have been experiencing this phenomenon directly in recent years as migratory birds have become less diverse and the threat posed by West Nile encephalitis has spread. It turns out that the birds that host the disease happen to also be the tough ones that prevail amid a thinned population. Those survivors have supported higher infection rates in mosquitoes and more spread to people.

Similarly, a study published last month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that as larger mammals suffer declines at the hands of hunters or loggers or shifting climate patterns, smaller species, including bats, rats and other rodents, are thriving, either because they are more resilient to the degraded environment or they are able to live better among people.

It is these small animals, the ones that manage to find food in garbage cans or build nests in the eaves of buildings, that are proving most adaptable to human interference and also happen to spread disease. Rodents alone accounted for more than 60% of all the diseases transmitted from animals to people, the researchers found.

Warmer temperatures and higher rainfall associated with climate change - coupled with the loss of predators - are bound to make the rodent problem worse, with calamitous implications. In 1999, for example, parts of Panama saw three times as much rainfall as usual. The rat population exploded, researchers found. And so did the viruses rats carry, along with the chances those viruses would jump to people. That same year, a fatal lung disease transmitted through the saliva, feces and urine of rats and mice called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome emerged in Panama for the first time, according to a report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

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As much as weather changes can drive changes in species, so does altering the landscape for new farms and new cities. In fact, researchers attribute a full 30% of emerging contagion to what they call "land use change." Nothing drives land use shifts more than conversion for farmland and feedstock - a result of the push to feed the planet's 7.8 billion people. As the global population surges to 10 billion over the next 35 years, and the capacity to farm food is stressed further again by the warming climate, the demand for land will only get more intense. Already, more than one-third of the planet's land surface, and three-quarters of all of its fresh water, go toward the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. These are the places where infectious diseases spread most often.

Take, for example, the 1999 Nipah outbreak in Malaysia - the true-life subject matter adapted for the film "Contagion." Rapid clearcutting of the forests there to make way for palm plantations drove fruit bats to the edge of the trees. (Separate research also suggests that climate changes are shifting fruit bats' food supply.) They found places to roost, as it happens, alongside a hog farm. As the bats gorged themselves on fruit, they dropped pieces of food from the branches, along with their urine, into the pigsties, where at least one pig is believed to have eaten some. When the pig was slaughtered and brought to market, an outbreak is believed to have been spread by the man who handled the meat. More than 100 people died.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that fully three-quarters of all new viruses have emerged from animals. Even the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is believed to have begun when a boy dug into a tree stump that happened to be the roost of bats carrying the virus.

As Christine Johnson, the associate director of the One Health Institute, an interdisciplinary epidemiological program at the University of California, Davis, puts it, global health policymakers have a responsibility to understand how climate, habitat and land use changes lead to disease. Almost every major epidemic we know of over the past couple of decades - SARS, COVID-19, Ebola and Nipah virus - jumped to people from wildlife enduring extreme climate and habitat strain, and still, "we're naive to them," she said. "That puts us in a dangerous place."

Once new diseases are let loose in our environment, changing temperatures and precipitation are also changing how those diseases spread - and not for the better. Warming climates increase the range within which a disease can find a home, especially those transmitted by "vectors," mosquitoes and ticks that carry a pathogen from its primary host to its new victim.

A 2008 study in the journal Nature found nearly one-third of emerging infectious diseases over the past 10 years were vector-borne, and that the jumps matched unusual changes in the climate. Especially in cases where insects like infection-bearing mosquitoes are chasing warmer temperatures, the study said, "climate change may drive the emergence of diseases."

A mosquito in a laboratory of the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute in Germany. Scientists say at least 500 million more people, including 55 million more Americans, will be susceptible to mosquito-borne diseases as the climate warms. (Steffen Kugler/Getty Images)

Ticks and mosquitoes now thrive in places they'd never ventured before. As tropical species move northward, they are bringing dangerous pathogens with them. The Zika virus or Chikungunya, a mosquito-spread virus that manifests in intense joint pain, were once unseen in the United States, but both were transmitted locally, not brought home by travelers, in southern Texas and Florida in recent years.

Soon, they'll be spreading further northward. According to a 2019 study in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, by 2050, disease-carrying mosquitoes will ultimately reach 500 million more people than they do today, including some 55 million more Americans. In 2013, dengue fever - an affliction affecting nearly 400 million people a year, but normally associated with the poorest regions of Africa - was transmitted locally in New York for the first time.

"The long-term risk from dengue may be much higher than COVID," said Scott Weaver, the director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "It's a disease of poor countries, so it doesn't get the attention it deserves."

The chain of events that ultimately leads to a pandemic can be long and subtle, steered by shifts in the ecosystem. The 1999 West Nile outbreak in the U.S., for example, came after climate-driven droughts dried up streams and rivers, leaving pools of stagnant water where mosquitoes bred unhindered. It turns out the loss of water also killed off their predators - dragonflies and frogs that depend on large watering holes were gone.

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Coronaviruses like COVID-19 aren't likely to be carried by insects - they don't leave enough infected virus cells in the blood. But one in five other viruses transmitted from animals to people are vector-borne, said U.C. Davis' Johnson, meaning it's only a matter of time before other exotic animal-driven pathogens are driven from the forests of the global tropics to the United States or Canada or Europe because of the warming climate. "Climate is going to shift vulnerability to that," Johnson said, "and I think some of these regions are not prepared."

The changing climate won't just affect how the diseases move about the planet, it will also shape how easily we get sick. According to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Currents Influenza, warm winters were predictors of the most severe flu seasons in the following year. The brief respite in year one, it turns out, relaxed people's natural defenses and reduced "herd immunity," setting conditions for the virus to rage back with a vengeance.

Even harsh swings from hot to cold, or sudden storms - exactly the kinds of climate-induced patterns we're already seeing - make people more likely to get sick. A study in the journal Environmental Research Letters linked the brutal 2017-18 flu season - which killed 79,000 people - to erratic temperature swings and extreme weather that winter, the same period in which a spate of floods and hurricanes devastated much of the country. If the climate crisis continues on its current trajectory, the authors wrote, respiratory infections like the flu will sharply increase. The chance of a flu epidemic in America's most populated cities will increase by as much as 50% this century, and flu-related deaths in Europe could also jump by 50%.

"We're on a very dangerous path right now," said the University of Texas' Weaver. Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable, he said, "and I think that increases in disease are going to come along with it."

Twelve months before the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed, a group of epidemiologists working with a U.S. Agency for International Development project called PREDICT, or Pandemic Influenza and other Emerging Threats, was deep in the remote leafy jungle of southern China's Yunnan province hunting for what it believed to be one of the greatest dangers to civilization: a wellspring of emerging viruses.

A decade of study there had identified a pattern of obscure illnesses affecting remote villagers who used bat guano as fertilizer and sometimes for medicine. Scientists traced dozens of unnamed, emerging viruses to caves inhabited by horseshoe bats. Any one of them might have triggered a global pandemic killing a million people. But luck - and mostly luck alone - had so far kept the viruses from leaping out of those remote communities and into the mainstream population.

The luck is likely to run out, as Yunnan is undergoing enormous change. Quaint subsistence farm plots were overtaken by hastily erected apartment towers and high-speed rail lines, as the province endured dizzying development fueled by decades of Chinese economic expansion. Cities' footprints swelled, pushing back the forests. More people moved into rural places and the wildlife trade, common to such frontier regions, thrived. With every new person and every felled tree, the bats' habitat shrank, putting the viruses they carried on a collision course with humanity. By late 2018, epidemiologists there were bracing for what they call "spillover," or the failure to keep a virus locally contained as it jumped from the bats and villages of Yunnan into the wider world.

In late 2018, the Trump administration, as part of a sweeping effort to bring U.S. programs in China to a halt, abruptly shut down the research - and its efforts to intercept the spread of a new novel coronavirus along with it. "We got a cease and desist," said Dennis Carroll, who founded the PREDICT program and has been instrumental in global work to address the risks from emerging viruses. By late 2019, USAID had cut the program's global funding.

USAID did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica.

Read More

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The loss is immense. The researchers believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, racing to sequence the genes of the coronaviruses they'd extracted from the horseshoe bat and to begin work on vaccines. They'd campaigned for years for policymakers to fully consider what they'd learned about how land development and climate changes were driving the spread of disease, and they thought their research could literally provide governments a map to the hot spots most likely to spawn the next pandemic. They also hoped the genetic material they'd collected could lead to a vaccine not just for one lethal variation of COVID, but perhaps - like a missile defense shield for the biosphere - to address a whole family of viruses at once. (In fact, the gene work they were able to complete was used to test the efficacy of remdesivir, an experimental drug that early clinical trial data shows can help COVID-19 patients.)

Carroll said knowledge of the virus genomes had the potential "to totally transform how we think about future biomedical interventions before there's an emergence." His goal was to not just react to a pandemic, but to change the very definition of preparedness.

If PREDICT's efforts in China had the remote potential to fend off the current COVID pandemic, though, it also offered an opportunity to study how climate and land development were driving disease.

But there has been little appetite for that inquiry among policymakers. PREDICT's staff and advisers have pushed the U.S. government to consider how welding public health policy with environmental and climate science could help stem the spread of contagions. Climate change was featured in presentations that PREDICT staff made to Congress, according to U.C. Davis' Johnson, who is now also the director of PREDICT, which received a temporary funding extension this spring. And until 2016, leadership of New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, the research group working under PREDICT funding in Yunnan, was invited several times to the White House to advise on global health policy.

Since Donald Trump was elected, the group hasn't been invited back.

"It's falling on deaf ears," said Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance's president.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

What Daszak really wants - in addition to restored funding to continue his work - is the public and leaders to understand that it's human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis. In China's forests, he looks past the destruction of trees and asks why they are being cut in the first place, and who is paying the cost. Metals for iPhones and palm oil for processed foods are among the products that come straight out of South Asian and African emerging disease hot spots.

"We turn a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this," he said. "We get cheap goods through Walmart, and then we pay for it forever through the rise in pandemics. It's upside down."

Abrahm Lustgarten
Abrahm Lustgarten covers energy, water, climate change and anything else having to do with the environment for ProPublica.

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How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease

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The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous. Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people - especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds - has skyrocketed.

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The main idea of the CDC article is that climate change poses a significant threat to public health, particularly in relation to infectious diseases. The article explains that climate change can increase the range and survival of disease vectors, alter the timing of seasonal transmission, and create new opportunities for the emergence of new diseases. This is particularly concerning as the article provides specific examples of diseases that are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, such as Lyme disease, West Nile virus, cholera and salmonella. Additionally, the article highlights the fact that climate change exacerbates existing health disparities and disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.

To support this main idea, the article emphasizes the importance of addressing the impacts of climate change on infectious diseases by providing resources and guidance for healthcare providers and public health officials to understand and respond to these impacts. It also stresses the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a key strategy for mitigating the impacts of climate change on infectious diseases and public health. The article presents the need of addressing climate change as a public health emergency and calls for increased funding and action to protect public health in order to mitigate the future impact of climate change on human health.

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Download the full version of this page [PDF - 4 pages]
Our Risk For Infectious Diseases Is Increasing Because of Climate Change
As the nation's public health leader, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is actively engaged in a national effort to protect the public's health from the harmful effects of climate change. Scientists from CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID) are at the forefront of many of these efforts. This report highlights some of that work and also looks ahead to the important work yet to come.
Lyme disease, West Nile virus disease, and Valley fever. These are just some of the infectious diseases that are on the rise and spreading to new areas of the United States. Milder winters, warmer summers, and fewer days of frost make it easier for these and other infectious diseases to expand into new geographic areas and infect more people. To understand climate change's impact, it's important to look at some of the common ways these diseases spread-through mosquito and tick bites, contact with animals, fungi, and water.

As the climate changes, the risk also increases for health threats such as:

Anaplasmosis

Anthrax

Antibiotic-resistant infections

Cryptosporidiosis

Dengue

Ehrlichiosis

Fungal diseases like valley fever and histoplasmosis

Giardiasis

Hantavirus

Harmful algal bloom-associated illness

Lyme disease

Plague

Rabies

Spotted fever rickettsiosis

Salmonellosis

Vibriosis

West Nile virus disease

Mosquitoes and Tick Bites

Mild winters, early springs, and warmer temperatures are giving mosquitoes and ticks more time to reproduce, spread diseases, and expand their habitats throughout the United States. Between 2004 and 2018, the number of reported illnesses from mosquito, tick, and flea bites more than doubled, with more than 760,000 cases reported in the United States. Nine new germs spread by mosquitoes and ticks were discovered or introduced into the United States during this period. The geographic ranges where ticks spread Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, and spotted fever rickettsiosis have expanded, and experts predict that tickborne diseases will continue to increase and perhaps worsen. Longer, warmer summers have also given mosquitoes more time to reproduce and spread diseases. In 2012, a mild winter, early spring, and hot summer set the stage for an outbreak of West Nile virus disease in the United States, resulting in more than 5,600 illnesses and 286 deaths.

Contact With Animals

Climate change has forced some animal species into new habitats as their natural habitats disappear, and it has expanded the habitats of other animals. This movement of animals into new areas increases opportunities for contact between humans and animals and the potential spread of zoonotic diseases, as these examples show:

Wildlife carrying the rabies virus are expanding to new geographic areas of the country.

Arctic temperatures are rising more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world. Warming temperatures in Alaska have led to increases in vole populations, which can spread diseases like Alaskapox to humans.

As global temperatures rise, deadly diseases that are a threat in other countries - like Ebola, Lassa, Rift Valley fever, and monkeypox - will increase along with the risk of them being imported into the United States.

Fungi

Rising temperatures have allowed certain disease-causing fungi to spread into new areas that previously were too cold for them to survive. For example, Valley fever - caused by a fungus that lives in the soil in hot and dry areas - has already spread into the Pacific Northwest. This fungus can cause severe infections and death and is often misdiagnosed and treated inappropriately. As the difference between environmental temperatures and human body temperatures narrows, new fungal diseases may emerge as fungi become more adapted to surviving in humans. Climate change also increases the risk for natural disasters and flooding, which can increase the risk for mold to grow in people's homes. Certain molds can cause deadly infections of the lungs and brain.

Water

Scientists predict that climate change will have devastating effects on freshwater and marine environments. For example, we could see more frequent and more severe instances of harmful algal blooms, which are the rapid growth of algae or cyanobacteria in lakes, rivers, oceans, and bays. Warming temperatures in Lake Erie have contributed to extensive toxic blooms that last into the early winter months. Harmful algal blooms can look like foam, scum, paint, or mats on the surface of water and can be different colors. They endanger our health when we eat contaminated shellfish. They also can harm pets, livestock, wildlife, and the environment. While no human deaths caused by cyanobacteria have been reported in the United States, some of these toxins can make dogs and other animals sick and possibly even cause death within hours to days. Dog deaths have been reported after dogs swam in or drank fresh water containing cyanobacterial toxins.

Additionally, scientific evidence shows that traces of antibiotics are present and can sometimes remain in the environment (waterways and soils) for a long time. Scientists need to do more research to better understand the connection between the environment, existing and emerging antibiotic resistance and its spread, and the impact on human health.

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Download the full version of this page [PDF - 4 pages] As the nation's public health leader, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is actively engaged in a national effort to protect the public's health from the harmful effects of climate change.