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Review
. 2022 Aug;11(4):1371-1390.
doi: 10.1007/s40121-022-00647-3. Epub 2022 May 19.

Climate Change and Cascading Risks from Infectious Disease

Affiliations
Review

Climate Change and Cascading Risks from Infectious Disease

Jan C Semenza et al. Infect Dis Ther. 2022 Aug.

Abstract

Climate change is adversely affecting the burden of infectious disease throughout the world, which is a health security threat. Climate-sensitive infectious disease includes vector-borne diseases such as malaria, whose transmission potential is expected to increase because of enhanced climatic suitability for the mosquito vector in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America. Climatic suitability for the mosquitoes that can carry dengue, Zika, and chikungunya is also likely to increase, facilitating further increases in the geographic range and longer transmission seasons, and raising concern for expansion of these diseases into temperate zones, particularly under higher greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Early spring temperatures in 2018 seem to have contributed to the early onset and extensive West Nile virus outbreak in Europe, a pathogen expected to expand further beyond its current distribution, due to a warming climate. As for tick-borne diseases, climate change is projected to continue to contribute to the spread of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis, particularly in North America and Europe. Schistosomiasis is a water-borne disease and public health concern in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia; climate change is anticipated to change its distribution, with both expansions and contractions expected. Other water-borne diseases that cause diarrheal diseases have declined significantly over the last decades owing to socioeconomic development and public health measures but changes in climate can reverse some of these positive developments. Weather and climate events, population movement, land use changes, urbanization, global trade, and other drivers can catalyze a succession of secondary events that can lead to a range of health impacts, including infectious disease outbreaks. These cascading risk pathways of causally connected events can result in large-scale outbreaks and affect society at large. We review climatic and other cascading drivers of infectious disease with projections under different climate change scenarios. Supplementary file1 (MP4 328467 KB).

Keywords: Cascading risks; Chikungunya; Climate change; Dengue; Exposure; Hazard; Infectious diseases; Lyme disease; Malaria; Vulnerability.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Cascading risks from infectious disease, due to a nexus of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Climatic hazards (e.g., extreme rain event or heat; outer spiral), amplified by societal vulnerabilities can trigger new hazards, such as floodwater contaminated with pathogens or high mosquito densities. Cascading events (inner spiral) caused by these infectious disease hazards and amplified by newly attained vulnerabilities can result in population exposure and give rise to water-borne or mosquito-borne disease outbreaks, respectively
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Change in the potential abundance of A. aegypti (per larval site) over the twenty-first century (2090–2099 relative to 1987–2016). The two panels correspond to two carbon emission scenarios: RCP2.6 (a) and RCP8.5 (b). Source: Reference [27]
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The vector for West Nile virus: C. pipiens mosquito distribution in Europe as of September 2021. Source: ECDC, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/culex-pipiens-group-current-known-distribution-september-2021

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