Expert says climate change will spread global disease

JEJU ISLAND, South Korea (AFP) – Climate change will have an overwhelmingly negative impact on health with possibly one billion more people at risk from dengue fever within 80 years, an expert said Tuesday.

While there would be some positive effects, “the balance of health effects is on the negative side,” Alistair Woodward, a professor at the University of Auckland, told a regional meeting of the World Health Organisation.


Woodward was a lead writer for the fourth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

Giving examples in a speech, he said that in China’s Jiangsu province the winter freezing zone has moved northwards. The water snail that transmits schistosomiasis had also shifted northwards, putting perhaps 20 million people at risk of the parasitic disease also known as bilharziasis.

In France extreme heat in August 2003 led to about 25,000 deaths. In the WHO’s Western Pacific region, a heat wave in summer 1998 increased mortality in Shanghai threefold.

AFP