An analysis of all the studies published on the subject were published on August 8 in the journal “Nature Climate Change”.
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malaria, dengue, encephalitis, Lyme disease … up to 58 % of infectious or allergic diseases that affect humanity were, at some point, aggravated by climatic hazards linked to the emission of gas effect de greenhouse (GHG). Or 218 of the 375 known human diseases linked to pathogens. Conversely, 16 % of these diseases have sometimes been attenuated. These are the main conclusions of an American study, published on August 8 in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
The authors, coordinated by Erik Franklin, a geographer from the University of Hawaii, have scrutinized the impact, on human diseases caused by pathogens, nine climate upheavals linked to GHGs: atmospheric warming, but Also drought, heat waves, forest fires, extreme precipitation and floods, warming of oceans, increased storms and sea level elevation. They also analyzed another consequence of these emissions, The modification of the terrestrial plant cover.
“This bibliographic analysis seems completely serious to me, estimates the virologist Yannick Simonin, of Inserm, at the University of Montpellier. The rate of 58 % must be put into perspective, but it has the merit of giving an order of magnitude and to alert on the importance of climate change in the increase in human diseases linked to pathogens, whether these diseases are emerging or older. “
The Hawaiian team first sought, in the Google Scholar database, all of the published studies which presented concrete examples of pathogenic diseases affected by one or the other of these climatic risks. In total, the researchers examined more than 77,000 titles. They retained 830, which reported an explicit climate risk (heat waves, floods …) affecting a given disease (malaria, dengue …), in a region and/u over a given period.
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Results: 58 % of known human pathogenic diseases (218 out of 375) were affected, at one time or another, by at least one of these climate change. Among them, 160 diseases were aggravated by warming, 122 by excessive precipitation, 121 by floods, 81 by droughts, 71 by storms, 61 by changes in land cover, 43 by warming of the oceans, 21 by fires, 20 by heat waves and 10 by increasing sea level.
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