Malaria. Dengue Fever. Encephalitis. These names are not usually heard in emergency rooms and doctor’s offices in the United States. But if we don’t act to curb global warming, they will be. As temperatures rise, disease-carrying mosquitoes and rodents spread, infecting people in their wake. Doctors at the Harvard Medical School have linked recent U.S. outbreaks of dengue ("breakbone") fever, malaria, hantavirus and other diseases to climate change. (Source).
[Global warming] would be accompanied by changes in rainfall patterns, greater precipitation and humidity in the atmosphere, and many new areas of floodwater.
This in turn could lead to an increase in disease-carrying pests such as ticks, mosquitoes and rats, which live in warmer climates and whose breeding-grounds are often in damp areas. (Source).
Climate changes already are thought to have contributed to an epidemic of avian malaria that wiped out thousands of birds in Hawaii, the spread of an insect-borne pathogen that causes distemper in African lions, and the bleaching of coral reefs attacked by diseases that thrive in warming seas. (Source).
Warmer global temperatures will allow an expansion of the geographic range within which both the mosquito and parasite could survive with sufficient abundance for sustained transmission. Model predictions indicate that a 3° C global temperature rise by 2100 could increase the number of annual malaria cases by 50-80 million (not considering factors such as local control measures or health services) (Martens et al., 1995). (Source).
