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Climate change may exacerbate 58% of the infectious diseases humans come into contact with worldwide, from common waterborne viruses to deadly diseases like plague, new research shows.
A team of environmental and health scientists have reviewed decades of scientific papers on all known pathogens to create a map of human risks compounded by climate-related hazards.
The figures are surprising. Of 375 human diseases, we found that 218 of them, more than half, may be affected by climate change.
Flooding, for example, can spread hepatitis. Rising temperatures can extend the lifespan of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Droughts can attract hantavirus-infected rodents to communities in their search for food.
With climate change influencing more than 1,000 such transmission pathways and climate risks increasing globally, we have concluded that expecting societies to successfully adapt to all of them is not a realistic option. The world will have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change to reduce these risks.
Mapping climate risks to health
In order to prevent global health crises, humanity needs a thorough understanding of the pathways and magnitude by which climate change could affect diseases caused by pathogens.
We've focused on 10 climate-related hazards linked to rising greenhouse gas emissions: global warming, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rainfall, floods, storms, sea level rise, global warming, oceans and land cover change. Next, we looked for studies that discussed specific and quantifiable observations about the occurrence of human illnesses related to those hazards.
In total, we reviewed more than 77,000 scientific articles. Of these, 830 had a climate risk that affected a specific disease in a specific place and/or period of time, which allowed us to create a database of climate hazards, transmission routes, pathogens and diseases. An interactive map of all the pathways between the hazard and the pathogen is available online.
The greatest number of diseases aggravated by climate change is due to transmission by vectors, such as mosquitoes, bats and rodents. Regarding the type of climate hazard, most were associated with atmospheric warming (160 illnesses), heavy rainfall (122) and floods (121).
"If the climate is changing, the risk of these diseases is also changing," said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Doctors, like Patz, said they should think of illness as symptoms of a sick Earth.
"The findings of this study are frightening and well illustrate the enormous consequences of climate change on human pathogens," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University, who was not part of the study. "Those of us in infectious disease and microbiology must make climate change one of our priorities, and we must all work together to prevent what will undoubtedly be a catastrophe as a result of climate change."
In addition to looking at infectious diseases, the researchers broadened their search to look at all kinds of human diseases, including non-infectious diseases like asthma, allergies, and even animal bites to see how many diseases could be linked to climate hazards in some way. including infectious diseases. They found a total of 286 unique illnesses and of those 223 of those seemed to be made worse by weather hazards, nine were lessened by weather hazards and 54 had both aggravated and minimized cases, the study found.
The new study doesn't do the math to attribute changes, probabilities or magnitude of specific diseases to climate change, but finds cases where extreme weather was one likely factor among many. The study mapped the 1,006 connections between climate hazard and disease.
The study's lead author, Camilo Mora, a climate data analyst at the University of Hawaii, said what's important to note is that the study isn't about predicting future cases.
“There is no speculation here,” Mora said. “These are things that have already happened.”
An example that Mora knows first-hand. About five years ago, Mora's house in rural Colombia was flooded—for the first time in her memory there was water in her living room, creating an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes—and Mora contracted Chikungunya, a Nasty virus that is transmitted by mosquito bites. And although he survived, he still feels pain in his joints years later.
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