To the Editor,
I want to congratulate and respond to Petridou and Belfield’s1 insightful article into the impact of a changing climate on infectious disease epidemiology, which highlights an alarming and evolving challenge for clinicians worldwide. Their focus on the emergence of historically ‘tropical’ vector-borne diseases emerging in countries where there is either little local prevalence or clinician experience/expertise is indeed important.
In addition to the changing pattern of the known diseases and vectors discussed in the article (such as Aedes mosquitos), the changing climate is also predicted to have a huge impact on the distribution of mammal species worldwide, with a large potential for a spike in zoonotic transmission. Excellent and complex modelling work by Carlson et al2 has attempted to predict the impact of multiple interacting climate and socioeconomic changes on the global mammalian virus transmission rate. They predict, even in optimistic scenarios with very small changes in climate, many thousands of cross-species transmission events by 2070. It is foreseeable that some of these may result in the emergence of human-transmissible viruses, which could potentially have the ability to cause epidemic or pandemic outbreaks of new diseases, as was seen with COVID-19.
Moreover, this work does not take into account the avian vectors of viruses such as H5N1 influenza. Bird migration and behaviour is thought to be impacted by changes in climate,3 and the spread patterns of H5N1 virus have been associated with the migratory paths of certain bird species.4
Therefore, global temperature rises may not only trigger the emergence of new infectious diseases, but also accelerate or alter the transmission of currently closely monitored viruses with the potential to cause a significant burden of impact to both livestock and human populations worldwide, even in the current ‘best case’ 1.6°C of warming scenarios.5
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Dominik Kurzeja: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Software, Methodology, Conceptualization.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Footnotes
This article reflects the opinions of the author(s) and should not be taken to represent the policy of the Royal College of Physicians unless specifically stated.
References
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