Climate change impacts on vector-borne infectious diseases (A Review (original) (raw)
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The Impact of Climate Change on Emergence and Re-emergence of Vectorborne Human Diseases
Climate change is happening with greater speed, and intensity in the world, than it was initially predicted. Climate change refers to any significant changes in climate through, temperature, precipitation, wind, etc., for an extended period, as a result of the natural processes, such as sun’s intensity, ocean circulation, and human activities causing changes in the atmosphere’s composition through burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Climate change has a significant impact on human and animal health with regard to certain infectious diseases mainly transmitted through arthropod vectors. Climate change may affect disease by increasing the transmission cycles of vectors, and some regions, it may result in establishment of new diseases. The basic transmission cycle involves arthropod-animal host amplification, with humans acting as a dead-end host. Nearly half of the world’s population is infected by vector borne diseases, resulting in high mortality and morbidity. The important vector borne diseases affected by climate change include Chickengunya fever, dengue fever, dirofilariasis, Japanese encephalitis, leishmaniasis, malaria, plague, Rift Valley fever, tickborne diseases, trypanosomiasis, and West Nile fever, Over the next decades, it is predicted that billions of people in the world, particularly those in developing countries, will face the shortage of water and food, and greater risks to health, and life due to the climate change. Hence, continued interdisciplinary research is needed to understand the association between climate, weather, and infectious diseases. Predictive modeling should be developed to forecast the impact of climate change on the emergence of diseases, which affect the health of humans and animals. Additional studies should be conducted on disease dynamics, and how they may adapt to a changing climate. Key words: Animals, Arthropod vectors, Climate change, Humans, Infectious diseases
Vector Borne Diseases and Climate Change
Handbook of Research on Global Environmental Changes and Human Health, 2019
The incidence of emergence diseases including vector borne diseases, water diseases, and some physiologic impairment is considered sensitive to climate. Malaria, leishmaniasis, dengue, and viral encephalitis are among those diseases most influenced by climate. Variation in the incidence of vector borne diseases is associated with extreme weather events and annual changes in weather conditions. Africa in general and Morocco in particular are designated as an area of significant impact by numerous the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and notably susceptible to such drastic climate-related health consequences. Climatic parameter change would directly affect disease transmission by acting on the vector's geographic range, activity, or reproduction and by reduction the period of pathogen incubation. This chapter will discuss the increasing risk of some vector-borne diseases in hazard-prone localities. It further identifies the severe challenges both of health adaptation to climate change by highlighting Moroccan adaptive capacity to such crises.
The ecology of climate change and infectious diseases: comment
Ecology, 2010
The projected global increase in the distribution and prevalence of infectious diseases with climate change suggests a pending societal crisis. The subject is increasingly attracting the attention of health professionals and climate-change scientists, particularly with respect to malaria and other vector-transmitted human diseases. The result has been the emergence of a crisis discipline, reminiscent of the early phases of conservation biology. Latitudinal, altitudinal, seasonal, and interannual associations between climate and disease along with historical and experimental evidence suggest that climate, along with many other factors, can affect infectious diseases in a nonlinear fashion. However, although the globe is significantly warmer than it was a century ago, there is little evidence that climate change has already favored infectious diseases. While initial projections suggested dramatic future increases in the geographic range of infectious diseases, recent models predict range shifts in disease distributions, with little net increase in area. Many factors can affect infectious disease, and some may overshadow the effects of climate.
Vector-borne diseases are illnesses that are transmitted by vectors, which include mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas. These vectors can carry infective pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, which can be transferred from one host (carrier) to another. The seasonality, distribution, and prevalence of vector-borne diseases are influenced significantly by climate factors, primarily high and low temperature extremes and precipitation patterns. Climate change is likely to have both short- and long-term effects on vector-borne disease transmission and infection patterns, affecting both seasonal risk and broad geographic changes in disease occurrence over decades (see Figure ES6). While climate variability and climate change both alter the transmission of vector-borne diseases, they will likely interact with many other factors, including how pathogens adapt and change, the availability of hosts, changing ecosystems and land use, demographics, human behavior, and adaptive capacity. These complex interactions make it difficult to predict the effects of climate change on vector-borne diseases.
Climate change and infectious diseases: What can we expect?
Canada Communicable Disease Report, 2019
Recent and future climate change in Canada Warming trends have accelerated globally, with overall annual air temperature increases of nearly 1 °C during the period 1880-2017 (5). The years 2015 to 2017 were clearly warmer than any previous years (6), and the last three decades were warmer than any decade since 1850 (7). This trend varies geographically, with greater and faster warming over the Arctic and sub-Arctic basins, particularly in northeastern Canada, due to the rapid decrease of sea-ice and snow cover (8,9). Since 1948, the rate of warming in Canada as a whole has been more than two times that of the global mean, and the rate of warming in northern Canada (north of 60°N) has been roughly three times or more the global mean (10). Over northeastern Canada (north of 60°N and east of 110°W), the annual mean temperature has increased by 0.75-1.2 °C per decade over the last three decades compared with around 0.18 °C per decade globally (5). Mean air temperature will continue to increase as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise due to human activities.