Climate variability and change in the United States: potential impacts on vector- and rodent-borne diseases.
By D. Gubler, P. Reiter, K. Ebi, W. Yap, R. Nasci, J. Patz. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2001
719 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Diseases such as plague, typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and dengue fever, transmitted between humans by blood-feeding arthropods, were once common in the United States. Many of these diseases are no longer present, mainly because of changes in land use, agricultural methods, residential patterns, human behavior, and vector control. However, diseases that may be transmitted to humans from wild birds or mammals (zoonoses) continue to circulate in nature in many parts of the country. Most vector-borne diseases exhibit a distinct seasonal pattern, which clearly suggests that they are weather sensitive. Rainfall, temperature, and other weather variables affect in many ways both the vectors and the pathogens they transmit. For example, high temperatures can increase or reduce survival rate, depending on the vector, its behavior, ecology, and many other factors. Thus, the probability of transmission may or may not be increased by higher temperatures. The tremendous growth in international travel increases the risk of importation of vector-borne diseases, some of which can be transmitted locally under suitable circumstances at the right time of the year. But demographic and sociologic factors also play a critical role in determining disease incidence, and it is unlikely that these diseases will cause major epidemics in the United States if the public health infrastructure is maintained and improved.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9950912602a41bd93e9622ba704e5d4086914f66
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Citations in the corpus
- Estimating global impacts from climate change (2004, background): “…increase in risk as temperatures rise (in fact, underlying principles suggest that high temperatures might increase or decrease the survival of vectors and pathogens they transmit; see Gubler et al., 2001), they do suggest that such an increase in transmission may be more likely than not.”
- Effects of Global Climate on Infectious Disease: the Cholera Model (2002, background): “transmitted to animals by fleas and ticks, respectively, and hantavirus is transmitted by rodents (58).”
- Critical review of the vector status of Aedes albopictus (2004, background): “West Nile virus (WNV) has been isolated from the species in Pennsylvania (Holick et al., 2002). Kutz et al. (2003) found positive pools in the Baltimore–Washington area, suggesting a newly created enzootic focus for this virus, and believed that Ae.”
- Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (2006, neutral): “72, 73 In the northern hemisphere, H marginatum marginatum is usually activated by increasing temperature in the spring, particularly in April or May, and the immature stages are active in the summer between May and September.”
- Epidemiology of dengue: past, present and future prospects (2013, background): “52,57 While suitable climate factors are necessary to permit the resurgence and expansion of dengue transmission observed over the last 5 decades, human factors, including increasing global population, urbanization, and socioeconomic constraints on control measures, also contribute.”
- Rodent-borne diseases and their risks for public health (2009, background): “The ecology, development, behavior, and survival of arthropod vectors and hosts and the transmission dynamics of the diseases they transmit are strongly influenced by climatic factors (Gubler et al. 2001; Randolph and Storey 1999).”