Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Climate And Disease topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Lecturer links climate and environmental change to shifts in infectious diseases
Summary
The seminar connected climate variability, habitat change and human activity to altered seasonality and spread of diseases including cholera, influenza, hantavirus and Lyme disease, and noted rising strain diversity in some pathogens.
A university lecturer told the President's Lecture Series that climate and environmental changes are reshaping the seasonality and geographic range of several infectious diseases.
The claim matters because it links environmental drivers — sea surface temperature, rainfall variability and habitat fragmentation — to disease dynamics and public health risk.
The lecturer used cholera as a primary example, saying cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh historically align with plankton blooms: warming sea surface and increased phytoplankton production lead to larger zooplankton populations, which can carry Vibrio on their surfaces and in their guts; where people drink untreated water, outbreaks follow. The lecturer also cited a recent cholera epidemic in Senegal with a reported mortality rate near 20 percent versus typical 2–5 percent in Bangladesh, and said her team is sequencing strains from those outbreaks.
She described influenza research showing higher transmissibility at lower temperatures, and discussed the hantavirus outbreak in the U.S. Southwest in 1991–93 linked to El Niño‑driven increases in rodent populations and subsequent human exposures through dried rodent excreta. The lecturer attributed rises in Lyme disease to habitat changes and deer moving into populated areas, citing Maryland's Eastern Shore as an example.
The lecturer warned of “decoupling of life cycles” — climate or habitat shifts producing mismatches between hosts and pathogens with unpredictable effects. She said sequencing and ecological modeling are tools that can clarify links between environmental change and pathogen evolution.
