Climate Change to Mean More Mosquito-Carried Diseases
The past three years have successively broken records as the hottest on record, and warmer conditions during the concurrent El Nino event didn’t help. Hotter conditions, changes in rainfall (including flooding and drought) and human migration have all hastened the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
A 2015 report found the Aedes mosquito range expansion “to be the widest ever recorded; now extensive in all continents, including North America and Europe.” More research examining the potential risk of expanded mosquito habitats found that half a billion people could be at risk of diseases borne by this mosquito alone by 2061-80.
Climate change doesn’t just mean we’ll see different species of mosquitoes in new places; it also means they’ll likely become more active—and therefore more infectious. Simply increasing the temperature also “boosts their rates of reproduction and the number of blood meals they take, prolongs their breeding season, and shortens the maturation period for the microbes they disperse,” Harvard’s Paul Epstein wrote in 2005.
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