Climate change brings serious concerns about the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, both in Europe and in other parts of the world.
Mosquitoes transmit diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, and their prevalence has increased dramatically over the past eight decades due to rising temperatures and humidity, which favor their breeding.
The head of the global health resilience team at its Supercomputing Center BarcelonaProfessor Rachel Lowe, has warned that outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases are expected to spread in the coming decades to areas of EuropeAsia, North America and Australia, which had not been affected so far, as noted by the British newspaper The Guardian.
And at a conference of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in the Spanish metropolis he will warn through a presentation that the planet must be prepared for a rapid increase in the occurrence of such diseases.
How climate change favors the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes
“Global warming due to climate change means that the agencies [κουνούπια] diseases that carry and spread malaria and dengue fever can become acclimatized in more areas and outbreaks occur in areas whose populations and public health systems are unprepared.
The harsh reality is that longer warm seasons will widen the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favor increasingly frequent outbreaks that are becoming increasingly complex to manage,” said Professor Lowe.
The dengue threat to Europe
Dengue outbreaks were mostly recorded in tropical and subtropical regions as low temperatures at night kill mosquito larvae and eggs.
Longer-lasting warm areas and less frequent frosts have helped make dengue fever the fastest-spreading mosquito-borne viral disease worldwide, including in Europe.
The Asian tiger mosquito, which carries dengue fever, is now established in 13 European countries by 2023: Greece, Italy, San Marino, Malta, Monaco, France, Spain, Portugal, the enclave of Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
The mosquito is thriving as nine of the ten most favorable years for the transmission of the disease have been recorded since 2000 and the number of cases reported to the World Health Organization has increased eightfold in the last two decades from half a million in 2000 to over five million in 2019.
4.7 billion people will live until the end of the 21st century. in areas with mosquito-borne diseases
According to Professor Lowe, the collapse of the climate will give a huge boost to this spread as floods are followed by droughts which “may lead to greater transmission of the virus, with reservoirs providing additional breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
She pointed to the need to learn lessons from previous epidemics in order to take measures to prepare for future ones and underlined that if carbon emissions and population growth continue at the current rate, then by the end of the 21st century it is estimated that they will have doubled at 4.7 billion people living in areas with mosquito-borne diseases.
According to iefimerida, for her part, Professor Sabiha Esak, head of the Antimicrobial Resistance Unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, emphasized that the climate crisis is multiplying antimicrobial resistance.
“Climate change endangers the ecological and environmental integrity of living systems and makes it increasingly easier for pathogens to cause disease. The impact on aquatic systems, livestock and crops threatens the global food chain.
Human activities related to population growth and transport combined with climate change increase microbial resistance and the spread of waterborne and vector-borne human, animal and plant diseases,” he stressed.
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