2023-11-26 16:16:22
Dengue on Lake Garda and malaria in Florida have renewed concerns that warming will bring old diseases to us or threaten entirely new ones.
At the end of August, three people on Lake Garda fell ill with dengue fever – it is usually rampant in the tropics and is also called bone-crusher fever because, in addition to high temperatures, it causes extreme pain in the limbs – at the beginning of August, they already had malaria, which is often attributed to the tropics affected two people in Florida. This is the disease that still claims the most victims – up to 500,000 a year, most in Africa, most children – Dengue threatens a third of the world’s population and infects 100 million, around 30,000 die from it.
With the appearance of the two horrors in our country, will the entertainment industry come true with a cash grab that came up with a video game in 2013, the film version of which will be available as a streaming series this year: The Last of Us? It’s regarding a fungus that attacks people’s brains and turns them into cannibalistic beasts, of which there will soon be almost none left. The fact that this fungus can do this comes from the warming that drove it into mutations.
This is horror as usual, but it only exaggerates the worries that climate change has been causing epidemiologists – and the UN Climate Advisory Council IPCC – since the 1990s: warming might bring pathogens and/or vectors from the tropics to areas of the world that were previously inaccessible to them advance, it might even allow completely new pathogens to flourish. Initially it was regarding malaria: it might come to Europe! Older Viennese shook their heads because they remembered that following the end of World War II, US troops distributed malaria pills to the population because the hospitals – especially near the Danube floodplains – were filling up with people suffering from it because the medical and other infrastructure had collapsed.
The old horror of malaria is being pushed back by warming
And one of the epidemiologists also opposed this from the start: Paul Reiter, a doctor at the US CDC, which was founded in 1946 to eradicate malaria in the USA. Reiter pointed out once more and once more that malaria is not a tropical disease, but that it did not get its name by chance from the foul air in the swamps around Rome and was still widespread in the Middle Ages as far as Finland; it even appears in Shakespeare and Defoe: “For Malaria, climate change is irrelevant” (Science 289, S. 1697).
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