Everyone knows rats, bats, mold and mosquitoes can make people sick, but a new study published this week concludes such pathogens and hundreds more are being made worse as the world warms.
A group of researchers from the University of Hawaii compiled a list of 376 human diseases and allergens, then studied how they are affected by climate-related weather hazards such as heat waves, floods, drought, fire and rain.
They found nearly 60% of known pathogens that make people sick were made worse by warming-related weather hazards, reported the study, published this week in Nature Climate Change. The list included not only mosquito-borne viruses like malaria and dengue fever, but also asthma, monkeypox, shellfish poisoning, and even fungal infections like valley fever.
Researchers reviewed more than 70,000 scientific studies and articles to look for links between the pathogens and 10 climate-related weather hazards.
“The results were really sobering,” said Erik Franklin, an assistant professor at the university’s Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology and co-author of the study.
Climate hazards bring pathogens and people closer together, empowering pathogens and affecting people, Franklin said. “This is a massive vulnerability for people’s healthcare systems.”
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pathways to disease
Even after more than 25 years of warning about the effects of climate change on human health, Jonathan Patz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute, was still amazed at the many ways researchers were finding out how climate change hazards affect diseases influence.
“They found over 1,000 unique pathways,” said Patz, who was a co-author. “That was impressive for me.”
Trails included things like flood-borne diseases and mosquitoes, which thrive in heavy rains and spread malaria and other diseases. Warming, precipitation and flooding were the three most common routes of transmission of pathogens to humans.
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What do the findings mean?
“It just reinforces the key message that the climate crisis is a human health crisis,” Patz said. “When we say that 58% of all infections and other human pathogenic diseases are influenced by climate, this requires that we divert our attention from thinking about each individual disease and vaccine.”
The study reveals “worrying insights” into the possible consequences of new health crises in the future and points to an “urgent need” to reduce fossil fuel emissions that are causing the planet to warm, Franklin and others said.
“There are just too many diseases and modes of transmission for us to believe we can truly adapt to climate change,” said co-author Camilo Mora, professor of geography in the University of Hawaii College of Social Sciences. “This underscores the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.”
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Have some of the diseases been reduced by environmental hazards?
The study found that 63 pathogens had at some point been reduced by climatic hazards, such as in cases where warming reduced the spread of viral diseases. However, all but nine of these had also been made worse by climate at some point.
However, the authors cautioned that their work might reflect bias based on what the authors published in Google Scholar chose for their investigation. For example, researchers may conduct more studies on diseases that are made worse by climate change, or fewer studies on diseases that are less of a concern because of climate change.
Have other recent studies examined the effects of warming on pathogens?
Yes. More than half a dozen studies this year, including two this week, have pointed to the rising risk of disease transmission in a warming world.
Another study released this week, led by Mia Maltz, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, found that higher concentrations of dust, which contains toxins from around the world, are found at lower elevations in the mountains land in the Sierra Nevada. The study also concluded that increasing droughts could spread more pathogens in the dust.
“Sickness-causing dust is becoming more of a threat as the earth becomes drier and more arid,” Maltz said.
An April study co-authored by Colin Carlson, a global change biologist and assistant research professor at Georgetown University, and a group of collaborators found that changes in climate and land use are pushing previously isolated wildlife species — and their pathogens — into new areas could bring.
Carlson and others have also documented rapid distribution shifts in African Anopheles mosquitoes over the past century. The researchers question the role climate change may have played and suggest it is an important topic for future research.
A co-author of another study, Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard School of Public Health, told the Associated Press the Hawaii study is a good warning that warming and habitat loss are bringing animals and their diseases closer to humans.
“This study underscores how climate change may cause the dice to favor unwanted contagious surprises,” Bernstein told the AP in an email. “But of course it only reports what we already know, and what’s still unknown about pathogens, can be even more compelling about how preventing further climate change can prevent future disasters like COVID-19.”
What happens next?
University of Hawaii researchers have put together a sophisticated interactive website that others can use to see the links between climate-related hazards and pathogens.
“We hope it’s a much more useful tool,” Franklin said. “We hope it will be a resource for healthcare professionals to use in their own work.”
See the links to climate:Effects of climate change on human diseases
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Dinah Voyle’s Pulver covers climate and environmental issues for USA TODAY. She can be reached at [email protected] or at @dinahvp on Twitter.
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