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Has Your Doctor Talked To You About Climate Change? 

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Has Your Doctor Talked To You About Climate Change? 

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When Michael Howard arrives for a checkup with his lung specialist, he's worried about how his body will cope with the heat and humidity of a Boston summer.

"I lived in Florida for 14 years and I moved back because the humidity was just too much," Howard tells pulmonologist Mary Rice, as he settles into an exam room chair at a Beth Israel Deaconess HealthCare clinic.

Howard, who is 57, has COPD, a progressive lung disease that can be exacerbated by heat and humidity. Even inside a comfortable, climate-controlled room, his oxygen levels worry Rice. Howard reluctantly agrees to try using portable oxygen. He's resigned to wearing the clear plastic tubes looped over his ears and inserted in his nostrils. He assures Rice he has an air conditioner and will stay inside on really hot days. The doctor and patient agree that Howard should take his walks in the evenings to be sure that he gets enough exercise without overheating.

Then Howard turns to Rice with a question she didn't encounter in medical school: "Can I ask you: Last summer, why was it so hot?"

Rice, who studies air pollution, is ready.

"The overall trend of the hotter summers that we're seeing [is] due to climate change," Rice says, "and with the overall upward trend, we've got the consequences of climate change."

For Rice, connecting those consequences - heat waves, more pollen, longer allergy seasons - to her patients' health is becoming routine. She is among a very small but growing number of doctors and nurses who discuss those connections with patients.

In June, the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and American Heart Association were among 70 medical and public health groups that issued a call to action asking the U.S. government, business and leaders to recognize climate change as a health emergency.

"The health, safety and wellbeing of millions of people in the U.S. have already been harmed by human-caused climate change, and health risks in the future are dire without urgent action to fight climate change," the coalition statement said.

The World Health Organization calls climate change "the greatest health challenge of the 21st century," and a dozen U.S. medical societies urge action to limit global warming.

Some societies provide patient handouts that explain related health risks. But none have guidelines that explain how providers should talk to patients about climate change. There is no concrete list of "dos" - as in wear a seat belt, use sunscreen, and get exercise - or "don'ts" - as in don't smoke, don't drink too much and don't text while driving.

Climate change is different, says Rice, because an individual patient can't prevent it. So Rice focuses on steps her patients can take to cope with the consequences of heatwaves, more potent pollen and a longer allergy season.

That's Mary Heafy's main complaint. The 64-year-old has asthma that is worse during the allergy season. During her appointment with Rice, Heafy wants to discuss whether she's on the right medications. But she also wants to know why her eyes and nose are running and her chest is tight for longer periods every year.

"It feels like once [the allergy season] starts in the springtime, it doesn't end until there's a killing frost," Heafy tells Rice, with some exasperation.

"Yes," Rice nods, "because of global warming, the plants are flowering earlier in the spring. After hot summers, the trees are releasing more pollen the following season. And the ragweed - it's extending longer into the fall."

So Heafy may need stronger medicines and more air filters, her doctor says, and may spend more days wearing a mask - although the effort of breathing through a mask is hard on her lungs as well.

As she and the doctor finalize a prescription plan, Heafy observes that "physicians talk about things like smoking, but I don't know that every physician talks about the environmental impact."

There are many reasons few do. Besides the lack of guidelines, doctors say they don't have time during a 15- to 20-minute visit to approach something as complicated as climate change.

And the topic can be controversial: While a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 59% of Americans think climate change affects their local community "a great deal or some," only 31% say it affects them personally, and views vary widely by political party.

We contacted energy-industry trade groups to ask what role - if any - medical providers should have in the climate change conversation, but neither the American Petroleum Institute nor the American Fuel and Petroleum Manufacturers returned calls or email requests for comment.

Some doctors worry about challenging a patient's beliefs on the sometimes-fraught topic, according to Dr. Nitin Damle, thepast president of the American College of Physicians.

"It's a difficult conversation to have," says Damle, who practices internal medicine in Wakefield, R. I. . "Many people still think it's something they're not going to be affected by, but it's really not true."

Damle says he "takes the temperature" of patients, with some general questions about the environment or the weather, before deciding if he'll suggest that climate change is affecting their health.

Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance, says he's ready if patients want to talk about climate change, but he doesn't bring it up. Basu says he must make sure patients feel safe in the exam room. Raising a controversial political issue might erode that feeling. When patients do ask about climate change, it can be "a difficult conversation," he says.

"I have to be honest about the science and the threat that is there, and it is quite alarming," Basu says.

So alarming that Basu says he often refers patients to counseling. Psychiatrists concerned about the effects of climate change on mental health say there are no standards of care in their profession yet. They suggest a response must be tailored for each patient, but some common responses are emerging.
"We Are Hungry for Information"
One environmental group isn't waiting for doctors and nurses to figure how to talk to patients about climate change.

"We're trying to create a demand for these conversations to get started," says Molly Rauch, the public health policy director with Moms Clean Air Force, a project of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Rauch urges the group's more than one million members to ask doctors and nurses for guidance. For example: When should parents keep children indoors because the outdoor air is too dirty?

"This isn't too scary for us to hear about," Rauch says. "We are hungry for information about this, we want to know."

But Rauch says it doesn't seem like climate change is breaking into the medical community as a health issue. One study found classes about environmental health or global warming at only 20 out of 140 U.S. medical schools.

A few nursing schools are adding climate-related courses to their training, to prepare students for conversations with patients.

"Nurses need to catch up quickly," says Patrice Nicholas, director of the Center for Climate Change, Climate Justice and Health at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Nicholas attributes the delay, in part, to politics. "Climate change really needs to be reframed as a public health issue," Nicholas says.

The few doctors and nurses who have started discussing climate change with their patients say they've not had much pushback, but that may be because bringing climate change into the exam room is still very new.
This story is part of NPR's reporting partnership with and Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Has Your Doctor Talked To You About Climate Change?

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When Michael Howard arrives for a checkup with his lung specialist, he's worried about how his body will cope with the heat and humidity of a Boston summer. "I lived in Florida for 14 years and I moved back because the humidity was just too much," Howard tells pulmonologist Mary Rice, as he settles into an exam room chair at a Beth Israel Deaconess HealthCare clinic.

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How climate change helped Lyme disease invade America

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How climate change helped Lyme disease invade America

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Vox | 2017

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When President Donald Trump announced that he was pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, Yale epidemiology researcher Katharine Walter felt gutted. "[Global warming] is already happening," she said, "and the effects are already here."

Walter studies Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness that's spreading frighteningly quickly in the Eastern and Midwestern US, due in part to climate change. Lyme cases have more than doubled since the 1990s, and the number of counties that are now deemed high-risk for Lyme has increased by more than 320 percent in the same period.

"These effects of climate change will be felt globally, but also here in the US," Walter said, "and here in New York, in Trump's backyard."

New York state is an epicenter for Lyme. More than 90 percent of cases pop up in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and mid-Atlantic. And it's why New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has been calling on the federal government to more aggressively tackle Lyme.

But Trump's policies on climate change, Walter said, will likely do the opposite, and make climate-sensitive infectious diseases like Lyme even more common. Here are four things to know as we enter the season for the disease.

1) Lyme disease spreads to people through tick bites - but the disease can be really hard to diagnose

Lyme is the most common vector-borne disease in the US, more common West Nile or the Zika virus. But unlike Zika, which is transmitted from mosquitoes to humans, Lyme reaches people through tick bites after circulating through a chain of other species.

The bacteria typically live in mice, chipmunks, birds, and deer in wooded areas. And these are all animals that ticks feast on.

Ticks like humans too. They're attracted to the warmth and carbon dioxide we give off. Though they can't jump or fly, they typically crawl onto us when we brush against them while outdoors - walking through tall grass, playing in fields. If they're carrying the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria, they can infect us when they bite. (The precise amount of time a tick needs to be attached to the skin to transmit Lyme isn't known - though many claim it takes 24 to 36 hours. What is clear: The risk of infection increases the longer a tick is attached.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, common Lyme symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue, and muscle and joint aches. There's also that telltale skin rash, which manifests in a ring-shape on the body - but not everybody who has Lyme gets a rash or even the bullseye on their body (and Lyme-related rashes can also come in many shapes and sizes).

If Lyme is diagnosed early enough, an antibiotic can treat the illness. But when it's left untreated, the bacterial infection can spread into the joints, heart, and nervous system - causing more severe and dangerous symptoms like arthritis, heart palpitations, brain inflammation, and nerve pain. In some patients, even those who have been treated for Lyme, symptoms can persist for months and researchers don't understand why. (Doctors call this " post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome" - but it's controversial.)

To make matters more complicated, Lyme can be really difficult to diagnose. Many people never get a rash, and can't recall a tick bite. The FDA-approved blood tests on offer in the US aren't always accurate. So doctors are often left diagnosing the disease on the basis of clinical symptoms that can be really vague.

"It's one of these diseases that has a very nonspecific, acute presentation," said Duane Gubler, an infectious diseases specialist and former director of the division of vector-borne disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "There are many people out there with symptoms of chronic fatigue, muscle pain, and Lyme disease has become one of the catchalls for people who have an illness of unknown etiology and there's simply no clinical or lab test that can diagnose these people."

One patient, Priscilla Rodriguez, thinks she got bitten by a tick while horse riding in the parks around Washington, DC. It took nearly half a dozen doctors over a year to finally diagnose and treat her. "It was like whac-a-mole," she said. "The disease pops up at a different system of the body, so you think it's a different thing, you go to different doctors, and they can't figure it out."

2) Lyme disease has become increasingly common

In the US, the incidence of Lyme disease has doubled since 1991, from about four cases per 100,000 people to eight per 100,000 people. About 30,000 people are known to get sick with the disease each year, and the CDC thinks the real number of cases is about 10 times that. It's also spread to a wider area of the country.

The risk for the disease is concentrated in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest - with some pockets of Lyme cases on the West Coast. One of the key drivers in the Northeast is the reforestation of land that used to be farmland.

The environmental features on farms reduce tick-borne disease risks in at least two ways, said Dustin Brisson, a University of Pennsylvania researcher studying Lyme. "First, deer are important hosts for adult Ixodes scapularis ticks and large deer populations are at least partially responsible for the large tick population sizes we see today." And farmers tend to shoot them when go near crops. "Second, the absence of leaf litter on farmlands leaves ticks susceptible to dehydration and predation, which also reduces tick population sizes," he added. So these factors help tick and deer populations thrive when farms are reforested.

Hunting protections on deer have also helped the animals proliferate, and deer are particularly important in spreading Lyme to new areas because adult ticks often feed and mate on them. (As Walter said, "Deer help determine where ticks can survive and, therefore, the distribution of Lyme disease risk.")

With suburbanization, more and more people are living near the animals that carry Lyme. "People have moved into these woodlots and built their houses right in the middle of where Lyme is maintained in the mouse and deer populations," Gubler added. "That's why we've seen such a dramatic increase in Lyme in the US."

These factors are helping Lyme's geographic range spread - both northward and southward. "Each year more and more people are in areas where they could potentially become infected," Brisson added. And climate change certainly isn't helping matters.

3) A driver of the uptick in Lyme incidence: global warming

The Environmental Protection Agency tracks the number of Lyme cases, along with heat-related deaths and severe weather events, as an indicator of global warming.

That's because researchers think climate change is another driver of the trend - and they expect the situation to get much worse during the 21st century.

One of the most important determinants of where ticks can live is temperature. In warm seasons, ticks seek out new hosts to feast on. And warm seasons that last longer in broader parts of the country mean ticks are active for longer periods each year, and can live further and further north.

"Tick survival depends on the local climate, and the distribution or geographic range of where ticks occur is increasing - and this is driven in part by climate change," Walter explained.

Warmer temperatures can also increase the developmental rate of ticks - the time it takes for an immature tick to fully develop. In one study, researchers estimated global warming increased tick reproduction by up to two times in the US, and up to five times in Canada.

So climate change is aiding the disease two-fold: helping ticks reproduce, and helping them live in more parts of the US.

4) Beware plentiful acorn seasons

There are other factors that influence how far Lyme can spread: plentiful acorn seasons. It may sound weird, but it's another fascinating aspect of the ecology that helps Lyme proliferate - and part of why 2017 was a very bad year for the disease.

Tick-carrying mice feast on acorns, and there was a bumper crop for acorns in the US over the past two years. More acorns means there's more food for mice, helping rodent populations grow and increasing the number of hosts that carry Lyme-infected ticks.

"In the summer following acorn booms, white-footed mouse numbers explode," according to the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. The heavy mouse populations mean more feeding opportunities for ticks, Cary Institute disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld explained in a statement. "And that means that two years following a good acorn crop we see a high abundance of infected ticks, which represents a risk of human exposure to tick-borne disease."

To protect yourself, the CDC suggests avoiding areas with lots of mice and deer, and checking your body for ticks after you've been in wooded areas where you might have gotten bitten. If you find a tick on your body, the CDC recommends using tweezers to carefully remove it. Wearing insect repellent and clothing that covers your body can help keep ticks away, too.

At a broader level, policymakers can help drive down the risk of Lyme infection, Walter said, and tackling climate change should be a top priority.
For more on Lyme Disease, listen to the June 15 episode of Will you help keep Vox free for all? Today Explained: Little summer vampires.
There is tremendous power in understanding. Vox answers your most important questions and gives you clear information to help make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. A financial contribution to Vox will help us continue providing free explanatory journalism to the millions who are relying on us. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3.

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How climate change helped Lyme disease invade America

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When President Donald Trump announced that he was pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, Yale epidemiology researcher Katharine Walter felt gutted. "[Global warming] is already happening," she said, "and the effects are already here." Walter studies Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness that's spreading frighteningly quickly in the Eastern and Midwestern US, due in part to climate change.

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Melting permafrost in the Arctic is unlocking diseases and warping the landscape

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Melting permafrost in the Arctic is unlocking diseases and warping the landscape

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Vox | 2019

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You can find evidence of a changing climate everywhere on Earth. But nowhere are the changes more dramatic than in the Arctic.

Our world's northern polar region is warming twice as fast as the global average. And the consequences are easy to spot. On average, Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking every summer. The Greenland ice sheet is becoming unstable, and melting into the ocean at an accelerating rate.

Many changes in the Arctic are ominous, and some of the most troubling are occurring beneath the surface, in the permafrost. Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil that covers 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. It acts like a giant freezer, keeping microbes, carbon, poisonous mercury, and soil locked in place.

Now it's melting. And things are getting weird and creepy: The ground warps, folds, and caves. Roadways built on top of permafrost have becoming wavy roller coasters through the tundra. Long-dormant microbes - some trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years - are beginning to wake up, releasing equally ancient C02, and could potentially come to infect humans with deadly diseases. And the retreating ice is exposing frozen plants that haven't seen the sun in 45,000 years, as radiocarbon dating research suggests.

Thawing permafrost is also a time bomb: There's more carbon stored in the permafrost than in the atmosphere. Melting it risks accelerating global warming even further.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Wednesday released a 1,000-plus page report amassing all the best evidence on how the icy regions of the world and the oceans are threatened by climate change.

Permafrost temperatures keep rising, and the report paints a grim future. Even if the world manages to hit the IPCC target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, around 25 percent of the permafrost near the surface could be lost, the report finds. Changes to the permafrost (among other changes in the ocean and cryosphere) "are expected to be irreversible," the report states.

In a more severe scenario where the world continues to increase emissions and we hit 5 degrees of warming, around 69 percent could be lost. That would drastically change the landscape of the Arctic and potentially set off a further acceleration of global warming.

To better understand the strange changes in the permafrost, in 2017,I spoke with Robert Max Holmes, an earth systems scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center. When I reached him by phone, he was in Bethel, Alaska, a small outpost town 400 miles west of Anchorage, and had just come back from an eight-day research and teaching expedition in the wilderness.

A week earlier, Holmes and his students had set up temperature sensors in the soil near their encampment. Their first reading was 0.3°C. "It's barely frozen. And we just sort of sat there stunned. You don't know whether to cry or what. Because you're just like: My God, this whole thing is just going to change in a big way."

Here's how.

1) Permafrost has been frozen for millennia. Thawing it is a huge disruption.

The simplest definition of permafrost is ground that has been frozen for at least two years.

But it's so much more than that. In much of the Arctic, that ground has been frozen for tens of thousands of years. And a huge amount of it is frozen - permafrost rests in 25 percent of all the land area in the Northern Hemisphere.

The top few inches (up to a few feet) of the permafrost is what's known as the "active layer." This topsoil does thaw with yearly seasonal changes, and is home to a thriving ecosystem. So how do scientists know there's permafrost underneath it?

"We have these things called thaw depth probes, which is basically just a T-bar, a steel rod that's a centimeter in diameter and 1.5 meters or so long," Holmes says. They poke the ground with it. "It's like pushing a knife through warm butter or something, and then you hit the bottom of the tray, and boom" - there's your permafrost.

Eventually, if you dig deep enough, the permafrost again thaws due to heat from the Earth's core.

Permafrost is like the bedrock of the Arctic (you literally need jackhammers to break it apart). But rising air temperatures in the region are chipping away at this bedrock.

"Half the volume of permafrost may be frozen water," Holmes says. "When that thaws, the water just runs off. The water may head downhill or the water has a lower volume than is ice, so the ground just slumps and kind of falls apart."

(The New York Times has a great new interactive showing how much permafrost in the Alaska may inevitably melt.)

Every year, more permafrost grows closer to thawing, and the depth of the "active layer" - the top layer of permafrost that thaws in the summertime - is growing deeper in the Arctic regions north of Europe, a sign of instability.

2) The biggest threat is carbon

You can think of the Arctic permafrost as a giant kitchen freezer.

If you put organic (carbon-based) matter in your freezer, the food will stay intact. But if the freezer compressor breaks, it will slowly heat up. As it heats up, bacteria begin to eat your food. The bacteria make the food go rotten. And as the bacteria consume the food, they produce carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases and chemicals that smell terrible.

For tens of thousands of years, permafrost has acted like a freezer, keeping 1,400- to 1,600 gigatons (billion tons) of plant matter carbon trapped in the soil. (That's more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.) Some of the plant matter is more recent, and some is from glacial ice ages that radically transformed a lush landscape into a tundra.

"Plants are growing in permafrost regions, and when those plants die, because of the cold temperature, they don't fully decompose, so some of that organic carbon is left behind," Holmes says. When the permafrost thaws, "it starts to rot, it starts to decompose, and that's what's releasing carbon dioxide and methane," he says.

This is one reason scientists are so worried about a melting Arctic: When the bacteria turn the carbon in the Arctic into C02 and methane, it accelerates a feedback loop. The more methane and carbon released, the more warming. The more warming ... you get it.

A 2014 study in Environmental Research Lettersestimates that thawing permafrost could release around 120 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2100, resulting in 0.29°C of additional warming (give or take 0.21°C). By 2300, another study in Nature Geoscience concludes, the melting permafrost and its resulting carbon feedback loops could contribute to 1.69°C of warming. (That's on the high end. It could be as low as 0.13°C of warming.)

But these are just estimates, and they come with a good deal of uncertainty. (There's debate over how much greenhouse gases can be released out of the Arctic, and how long it would take.) It all depends on how quickly the Arctic warms. Some of this freed carbon might be taken up by new plant growth, the IPCC report finds. But even so, the report states, carbon released from permafrost will become a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. (Some scientists believe permafrost melt is already generating net positive carbon emissions, with emissions outpacing the ability of plants in the Artic region to capture the carbon.)

The logic here is simple: The more warming, the greater the risk of kick-starting this feedback loop. A study published in Nature Climate Change in 2017 predicted that 1.5 million square miles of permafrost would disappear with every additional 1°C of warming.

And carbon isn't the only pollutant trapped in the ice. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters finds that the Arctic permafrost is the largest repository of mercury on Earth. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. And scientists now think there is around 15 million gallons frozen in permafrost soils - nearly twice the amount of mercury found in all other soil, the ocean, and atmosphere combined.

"The release of heavy metals, particularly mercury, and other legacy contaminants currently stored in glaciers and permafrost, is projected to reduce water quality for freshwater biota, household use and irrigation," the IPCC reports.

Scientists don't know how much of this mercury could be released, or when, the Washington Post explains. But they do know this: Continued melting will make it more likely for the mercury to be released, pollute the ocean, and accumulate in the food chain.

3) Ancient microbes are waking up

In August 2016, an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia sickened 72 people and took the life of a 12-year-old boy. Health officials pinpointed the outbreak to an unusual source.

Abnormally high temperatures had thawed the corpses of long-dead reindeer and other animals. Some of these bodies may have been infected with anthrax, and as Wired explained, the soil in Siberia is normally much too cold to dig deep graves. "The disease from thawing human and animal remains can get into groundwater that people then drink," Wired reported.

Scientists are worried that as more permafrost thaws, especially in Siberia, there may be more outbreaks of long-dormant anthrax as burial grounds thaw.

That's because the deep freeze of the permafrost doesn't just keep carbon from escaping - it keeps microbes intact as well.

Permafrost is the place to preserve bacteria and viruses for hundreds of thousands - if not a million - years, explains Jean-Michel Claverie, a genomics researcher who studies ancient viruses and bacteria. "It is dark, it is cold, and it is also without oxygen. ... There is no [ultraviolet] light." All the bacteria need is a thaw to wake back up. "If you take a yogurt and put it in permafrost [that remains frozen], I'm sure in 10,000 years from now it still will be good to eat," he said in a 2017 interview.

Claverie is part of a scientific team that determined it's possible to revive 30,000-year-old viruses trapped in the permafrost. His work is centered on viruses that infect amoebas, not humans. But there's no reason why a flu virus, smallpox, or some long-lost human infection couldn't be revived the same way. These microbes are like time travelers - and they could thrive waking up in an age when humans have lost an immune defense against them.

I asked Claverie if there's an upper limit to how long viruses and (certain types of) bacteria could survive in the permafrost.

"The limit is the limit given by the permafrost," he explained, meaning he sees no limit. Permafrost is 1,000 meters deep in places, "which make it about a million, 1.5 million year old," he said.

The danger here, he emphasized, is not from the slow thawing of the permafrost itself. That is, if the permafrost melts, and we leave the land alone, we're unlikely to come into contact with ancient deadly diseases. The fear is that the thawing will encourage greater excavation in the Arctic. Mining and other excavation projects will become more appealing as the region grows warmer. And these projects can put workers into contact with some very, very old bugs.

The threat is tiny. But it exists. The big lesson is that even viruses thought to be eradicated from Earth - like smallpox - may still lurk frozen, somewhere.

"We could actually catch a disease from a Neanderthal's remains," Claverie says. "Which is amazing."

4) Roadways are warping, foundations are shifting

When the permafrost melts, it literally changes the landscape, causing the ground to slump, and ripple.

In Bethel, Alaska, roadways are literally warping as the ground beneath them becomes less solid. In other places, the melting permafrost is creating craters and sinkholes. "You see buildings that are kind of slumping into the ground; you see that a lot in the Russian Arctic," Holmes says. Civil engineers are experimenting with new types of pilings and foundations to help keep Arctic buildings on strong footing.

There is one crater in Siberia so large it's gotten the nickname "doorway to the underworld." It's a kilometer long and up to 100 meters deep. And it's growing larger every year.

The IPCC report underscores this as well: Melting permafrost will transform the landscape. Lakes will increase by 50 percent by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario. Meanwhile, after the soils melt, they may start to dry out, and increase the likelihood of wildfire in polar regions.

5) When we lose the permafrost, we lose a record of natural history

There are dangers buried in the permafrost. But there are also natural treasures yet to be discovered. The ice preserves all: ancient animal remains and human history in the region. Think of Ötzi, the remarkably preserved 5,000-year-corpse found in the Alps. If he had thawed, what was left of his body would have decomposed, and a window into the world he lived in would have been lost forever.

There may be other Ötzis in the Arctic. Or preserved bits of mammoth DNA yet to be discovered. The melting may make some of these treasures briefly accessible - freed from the ice - but also threatens to quickly destroy them. According to Scientific American, once a specimen is uncovered and thawed, researchers have a year at most to recover it before it completely breaks down.

Are there any benefits to melting permafrost?

"One story I heard of in Bethel is that there are people who are happy that now they can dig a basement," Holmes says.

There are some benefits of thawing permafrost. For one, farming is now possible in parts of Alaska, as NPR reports. And "So it's not that it's all a bad news story," Holmes says, "but I'd say the silver lining is pretty thin and pretty small in relationship to the larger-scale negatives."
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There is tremendous power in understanding. Vox answers your most important questions and gives you clear information to help make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. A financial contribution to Vox will help us continue providing free explanatory journalism to the millions who are relying on us. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3.

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Melting permafrost in the Arctic is unlocking diseases and warping the landscape

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You can find evidence of a changing climate everywhere on Earth. But nowhere are the changes more dramatic than in the Arctic. Our world's northern polar region is warming twice as fast as the global average. And the consequences are easy to spot. On average, Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking every summer.

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Zika, dengue, and yellow fever are about to get much worse

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Zika, dengue, and yellow fever are about to get much worse

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Vox | 2019

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

Climate change, urbanization, and changes in human populations have driven many beloved species to the brink of extinction. But one of the deadliest animals in the world - the mosquito - is thriving.

Around 700,000 people die every year from mosquito-borne disease. The biggest culprit is malaria, but other mosquito-borne diseases, like dengue fever, chikungunya, and Zika, have proliferated wildly in recent years, and now make up a substantial share of the global burden of mosquito-borne disease. By some estimates, the number of dengue infections has increased 30-fold in the past 30 years.

The culprit? Climate change, plus urbanization and changes in where human populations are concentrated. And a new study in Nature Microbiology suggests that things will only get worse. Using statistical mapping techniques, they model how two disease-carrying mosquitos, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, have spread over the last 30 years, and predict how they'll spread over the next 30.

The results are alarming. These species of mosquito - which carry infectious diseases including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever, though not malaria - are expected to spread throughout most of the United States and Europe, exposing hundreds of millions of people to these diseases.

"Overall," the study finds, "our predicted expansions will see Ae. aegypti invading an estimated 19.96 million km by 2050 (19.91-23.45 million depending on the climate and urbanization scenarios), placing an estimated 49.13% (48.23-58.10%) of the world's population at risk of arbovirus transmission."

The expanding range of disease-transmitting mosquitos is a significant source of harms from climate change. These diseases largely have low mortality, but serious quality-of-life costs (in the case of Zika, brain damage in fetuses). It's not clear that most countries are ready to address the public health challenge.

What's driving the spread of mosquitos?

Modeling which parts of the world will be affected by mosquitos is tricky, in part because lots of factors affect their spread.

Climate change, of course, has vastly expanded the range of possible suitable habitats for many species of mosquito. Urbanization has, too. The paper argues that in the past, projections of mosquito spread were overly simplistic: "Those projections assumed that both species can fully infest all areas of predicted newly suitable habitat."

In reality, it's more complicated than that. Ae. aegypti, particularly, has a short flight range, and on its own would take centuries to expand the range of its habitat. It has mostly expanded through shipping: Mosquito eggs can catch a ride in tires and potted plants.

That means that urbanization, shipping, and adaptation among the mosquito species to new conditions all play a role in the spread of mosquitos. It's not sufficient to check whether a location will be habitable to them, argues the study - researchers also need to think about how quickly mosquitos will reach and colonize the area.

The authors solved this with a mathematical model that made use of statistics, especially in the US and Europe, on mosquito spread so far. They found that urbanization, shipping, and human activity will be the most relevant drivers of mosquito spread at first. Later, it'll be climate.

Once the mosquitos have infested an area, it's typically not long before a serious mosquito-borne disease outbreak. "Local outbreaks of these arboviruses have typically followed within 5-15 years of infestation by Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus," the paper notes.

The mosquito-borne illnesses that we'll be seeing more of in coming years

Neither Ae. aegypti nor Ae. albopictus carry malaria, the deadliest mosquito-borne illness. They do transmit Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Zika is a virus that was initially regarded as fairly harmless - typically causing no symptoms at all and typically mild even in those who experienced symptoms. That changed in 2016, when a surge of Zika cases in Brazil was linked with a dramatic increase in microcephaly, a birth defect in which the brain doesn't develop completely.

Chikungunya never appeared anywhere in the Western Hemisphere before 2013, but since then has been cropping up in Central and South America, with a few cases in the United States. It causes debilitating joint pain, though it typically lasts for only about a week and most people recover without any problems.

Dengue fever typically manifests as a rash and a high fever. It, too, typically lasts about a week, though in some cases it progresses into potentially lethal illnesses such as dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. There have been outbreaks of dengue fever in Hawaii, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Gulf Coast states, and a dramatic increase in dengue cases in much of South America.

The paper recommends that countries do everything they can to limit the spread of mosquitos into new territory. They recommend "entomological surveillance," or looking out for the bugs so that action can be taken quickly when they're encountered, "particularly around high-risk introduction routes such as ports and highways." They recommend nations develop "rapid response protocols for vector control to prevent introduced mosquitoes from establishing permanent population."

In the long run, though, we can't permanently halt the spread of mosquitos by extensively testing for their presence and responding strongly with localized insect-control measures. Those measures will delay mosquito colonization substantially, but they are unlikely to successfully prevent it, and the poorest countries are least likely to successfully implement them.

On a slightly more optimistic note, it seems possible that the spread of these so-called neglected tropical diseases into the US and Europe might mean they'll be a little less neglected. If more resources are dedicated to researching vaccinations and effective treatments, the toll of the diseases could be significantly reduced.

From a more ambitious perspective, there are technologies being developed which, if they worked, might solve the problem for good. Some researchers today are working on gene drives that would target the few species of mosquitos that carry diseases that affect humans (most mosquitos do not affect humans, and it'd be a bad idea to target those for eradication). There are lots of concerns about how to responsibly deploy powerful technologies like gene drives, but the increasing toll of mosquito-borne disease might motivate countries to figure out how to address those concerns and move forward.
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Zika, dengue, and yellow fever are about to get much worse

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Finding the best ways to do good. Climate change, urbanization, and changes in human populations have driven many beloved species to the brink of extinction. But one of the deadliest animals in the world - the mosquito - is thriving. Around 700,000 people die every year from mosquito-borne disease.

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Lyme disease is spreading. Blame ticks — and climate change

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Lyme disease is spreading. Blame ticks — and climate change

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VOX | 2020

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Lyme disease is spreading. Blame ticks — and climate change

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We're melting the Arctic and reviving deadly germs

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We're melting the Arctic and reviving deadly germs

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Vox | 2019

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We're melting the Arctic and reviving deadly germs

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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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ProPublica | 2020

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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

A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation - and a huge spike in carbon emissions.

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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SCIENTIFIC AMERICA | 2020

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Is there a link between climate change and COCID-19, and should we be worried about other infectious diseases?

We know climate change is having widespread impacts on our health, including by worsening illnesses ranging from seasonal allergies to heart and lung disease. But what do we know about how climate change affects infectious diseases? Here are some answers.
Do weather and climate influence the risk of COVID-19?
No. At the moment there is no scientific evidence to believe that either weather or climate have a particularly strong influence on the transmission of the COVID-19 disease, since the new disease currently also spreads in hot and humid climates. There is also no evidence that climate change made the emergence or transmission of COVID-19 more likely. Popular myths around COVID-19, such as that the novel coronavirus will be killed by hot or cold weather have also all been debunked.

COVID-19 is mainly transmitted directly from person to person through close contact, or through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or exhales. People can catch the disease if they breathe in those droplets, or by touching objects or surfaces where infected droplets have landed, then touching their eyes, nose or mouth.

While temperature and humidity may influence how long the virus survives outside of the human body, this effect is likely to be many degrees smaller compared to the degree of contact between people. Washing hands and reducing physical contact are therefore essential to breaking the chain of transmission, in all locations, seasons and climates.
Will climate change make the effects of COVID-19 worse?
Even though climate change did not cause the emergence of COVID-19, it could indirectly make the effects of a current or future pandemic worse. This is because it undermines the environmental conditions we need for good health-access to water, clean air, food and shelter-and places additional stress on health systems.

For example, climate change is causing widespread drought and desertification in much of the world, threatening the availability of water for consumption, food production, personal hygiene, and medical care, including for infectious disease. In drought-prone areas, medical facilities with water shortages will be ill-equipped to deal with the outbreak. Similarly, COVID-19 outbreaks will cripple already weakened health systems in regions that have seen an increase in the frequency and severity of climate-induced extreme weather events, such as Haiti or Mozambique.

For health systems already weakened by climate-related health impacts, flattening the curve of infections to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system becomes much more challenging.

What about other infectious diseases?

We do know that infections that are transmitted through water, through food, or by vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks, are highly sensitive to weather and climate conditions. The warmer, wetter and more variable conditions brought by climate change are therefore making it easier to transmit diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika virus, West Nile virus and Lyme disease in many parts of the world.

The Lancet Countdown, a scientific collaboration between 35 institutions, found that the climate suitability for disease transmission has already increased for diseases including dengue, malaria and cholera.

As an example, a changing climate is aggravating the negative health impacts of malaria by broadening the range of the Anopheles mosquito, the vector that spreads it. It also lengthens the season in which mosquitos reproduce and transmit the disease, thereby increasing the number of people at risk. A similar escalation takes place for diseases such as dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika, which are spread by Aedes mosquitos.

Lyme disease, which is spread by ticks, is also increasing its range and seasonality in many parts of North America and Europe, while waterborne cholera and cryptosporidiosis are increasing with more frequent droughts and flooding.

What can the global response to COVID-19 teach us about our response to climate change?

Both climate change and COVID-19 are public health threats, although they are playing out across vastly different timescales. Both require early action to save lives, as well as adequate health systems that provide equitable access to the most vulnerable in society.

Just as with COVID-19, how well communities can cope with infectious diseases and other health impacts that are intensified by climate change ultimately depends on the underlying strength and resilience of the health system, whether it ensures protection for the most vulnerable in society, and the extent to which it protects the public from both short and long-term health threats.

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Is there a link between climate change and COCID-19, and should we be worried about other infectious diseases? We know climate change is having widespread impacts on our health, including by worsening illnesses ranging from seasonal allergies to heart and lung disease. But what do we know about how climate change affects infectious diseases?

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The BMJ | 2020

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The Climate Conversations

Infectious diseases and environmental disturbances: How climate change may propel outbreaks | EP 20

What might Singapore's record number of dengue cases and the curious case of a cholera outbreak in Canada have to do with climate change? This ...

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Infectious diseases and environmental disturbances: How climate change may propel outbreaks | EP 20

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What might Singapore's record number of dengue cases and the curious case of a cholera outbreak in Canada have to do with climate change? This week, Jaime Ho speaks to Yann Boucher from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health on what we need to know about climate change, man-made natural disturbances and pandemics.

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What a changing climate means for human health

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What a changing climate means for human health

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Climate change poses clear threats to the environment and global ecosystems, but it also presents risks to human health. Evidence suggests that droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather events will become more severe as our planet continues to warm. These effects of climate change can directly harm people by exacerbating medical conditions such as respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular disease. They can also indirectly impact health as they cause food and water shortages that affect the most vulnerable among us. Our changing climate represents a challenge for public health throughout the world.

In this episode of our podcast, we spoke with Dr. Jay Lemery and Dr. Cecilia Sorensen, both physicians at the University of Colorado, about what climate change means for our health and patient care, and what the path to a healthy future looks like.

Want more? Subscribe and listen on iTunes or Google Play, or check out Podbean to listen via desktop!

This entry was posted in and tagged Climate change, Podcast. Bookmark the Medicine, Public Health permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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Podcast: What a changing climate means for human health

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Climate change poses clear threats to the environment and global ecosystems, but it also presents risks to human health. Evidence suggests that droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather events will become more severe as our planet continues to warm. These effects of climate change can directly harm

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The Unusual Relationship Between Climate and Pandemics

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The Unusual Relationship Between Climate and Pandemics

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Podcast: The Unusual Relationship Between Climate and Pandemics - Eos

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Two recent studies show how climate affects human pandemics and how pandemics, in turn, alter the environment.

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University of Colorado Consortium for Climate Change and Health

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University of Colorado Consortium for Climate Change and Health

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Broadly speaking, "public health infrastructure" refers to the systems that prevent disease and support the health and wellbeing of a community. General examples include water sanitation facilities, outbreak investigators, and air quality monitoring. In the context of vector-borne diseases, public health infrastructure could refer to disease and vector monitoring, source control (i.e.