Washington, Aug. 9 (BNA): Climate risks such as floods, heat waves and droughts have exacerbated more than half of the hundreds of infectious diseases known to humans, including malaria, hantavirus, cholera and anthrax, a study reports.
Researchers searched the medical literature for confirmed cases of disease and found that 218 of the 375 known human infectious diseases, or 58%, appeared to be made worse by one of the 10 extreme weather types linked to climate change, according to a study. in Nature Climate Change Monday.
Study 1006 identified a pathway from climate risk to patients. In some cases, heavy rains and floods make people sick through disease-carrying mosquitoes, mice, and deer.
There is warming oceans, heat waves contaminating seafood and other things we eat, and droughts that are bringing bats that carry viral infections to people, according to the Associated Press.
Doctors, going back to Hippocrates, have long associated disease with weather, but this study shows just how widespread the impact of climate on human health is.
“If the climate is changing, the risks for these diseases change,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Batz, director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Doctors, like Patz, said they need to think of illnesses as symptoms of sick earth.
“The results of this study are terrifying and illustrate very well the enormous consequences of climate change for 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 diseases and microbiology need to make climate change one of our priorities, and we need to work together to prevent what will undoubtedly be a catastrophe as a result of climate change.”
In addition to looking at infectious diseases, researchers have expanded their research to look at all kinds of human diseases, including non-communicable diseases such as asthma, allergies and even animal bites, to see how many diseases can be linked to climate risk in some way. including infectious diseases.
They found a total of 286 unique diseases, of which 223 appeared to have been exacerbated by climatic hazards, nine by climatic hazards, and 54 by limited exacerbations, according to the study.
The new study does not do the math to attribute specific disease changes, probabilities, or magnitude to climate change, but rather discovers instances in which extreme weather was a possible factor among many.
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