Disease in a warming climate

Fears of a global rise in infectious conditions may be unfounded.

Climate change takes the blame for many dim future prospects: rising sea levels, more frequent droughts and disappearing glaciers, to name just a few. But perhaps the warming trend should be absolved of responsibility for a predicted bump in the global burden of infectious disease.

That’s the bottom line of a paper in the April issue of the journal Ecology, which argues that the geographical ranges of infectious diseases are more likely to shift than to expand (K. D. Lafferty Ecology 90, 888

Five other papers in the same issue of the journal respond to Lafferty’s work, with widely varying views. Sarah Randolph, a parasite ecologist at the University of Oxford, UK, agrees with Lafferty and says that focusing on climate change can distract scientists and public-health agencies from the actual reasons that infectious diseases spread.

But Mercedes Pascual, a disease ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that other causes are themselves often affected by climate change. To polarize the causes as climate versus anything else is, she says, “not helpful”.

Nature