Climate hazards such as floods, heat waves and drought have worsened more than half of the hundreds of known infectious diseases, including malaria, hantavirus, cholera and anthrax, one study said.
Researchers looked through the medical literature of established cases of diseases and found that 218, or 58%, of the 375 known human infectious diseases were made worse by one of 10 types of extreme weather linked to climate change, according to one study. According to in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change.
The study mapped 1,006 routes from climate hazards to sick people. In some cases, rains and floods make people sick through disease-carrying mosquitoes, rats, and deer. There are warm seas and heat waves that dry up the seafood and other things we eat and that bring bats carrying viral infections to people.
Doctors going back to Hippocrates have long known weather-related illness, but this study shows just how widespread the impact of climate is on human health.
“If the climate is changing, the risk of these diseases is changing,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan PatzoDirector of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Doctors like Patz said they needed to think of diseases as symptoms of a sick earth.
“The findings of this study are terrifying and illustrate the enormous consequences of climate change on human pathogens,” said Dr. carlos del rio, an Emory University infectious disease specialist who was not part of the study. “Those of us in infectious diseases and microbiology need to make climate change one of our priorities, and we all need to work together to prevent the devastation resulting from climate change without a doubt. to be stopped.”
In addition to looking at infectious diseases, the researchers expanded their search to look at all kinds of human diseases, including non-communicable diseases such as asthma, allergies and even animal bites, to see That’s how many distortions they can add to climate hazards in some way. including infectious diseases. The study found that they found a total of 286 unique diseases, and 223 of them were worsened by climate threats, nine were reduced by climate threats and 54 had both increased and reduced cases.
The new study does not calculate to attribute specific disease changes, odds or magnitudes to climate change, but finds cases where extreme weather was a likely factor among many.
Camilo, lead author of the study moraA climate data analyst at the University of Hawaii said it’s important to note that the study is not about predicting future cases.
“There’s no speculation here,” Mora said. “These are things that have already happened.”
An example Mora already knows. About five years ago, Mora’s home in rural Colombia was flooded—in her memory the first time water was in her living room, making it an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes—and Mora contracted chikungunya, a disease caused by mosquitoes. It is a nasty virus that spreads through bites. And even though he survived, he still feels joint pain years later.
Sometimes climate change acts strangely. Mora also includes a 2016 case in Siberia, when a decade-old reindeer carcass was found dead from anthrax after the permafrost thawed from warming. A child touched it, got anthrax and started an outbreak.
Mora originally wanted to research medical cases to see how COVID-19 intersects with climate threats, if at all. They found cases where extreme weather increased and reduced the likelihood of COVID-19. In some cases, extreme heat in poor areas caused people to gather together to protect themselves from cold and exposure to disease, but in other situations, heavy rains reduced COVID spread as people stayed indoors and indoors. Stay away from others.
Longtime climate and public health expert Christie Abbey The University of Washington cautioned that they had concerns about how the findings were drawn and some of the study’s methods. He said it is an established fact that the burning of coal, oil and natural gas has caused frequent and intense extreme weather, and research has shown that weather patterns are associated with a number of health issues.
“However, correlation is not causation,” EB said in an email. “The authors did not discuss the extent to which the review of climate hazards has changed over the time period of the study and to what extent any changes are attributed to climate change.”
But the interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health, Emory in Del Rio, Dr. Aaron Bernstein and three other outside experts said the study is a good warning about climate and health for now. Future. Animals and their diseases are moved closer to humans, especially due to global warming and habitat loss. Bernstein Told.
“This study underscores how climate change can load the dice in favor of unwanted infectious wonders,” Bernstein said in an email. “But of course it only reports on what we already know and what is so far unknown about pathogens, which may be more compelling about how preventing further climate change can lead to a future like COVID-19.” disasters can be prevented.”