Climate change, its impact on emerging infectious diseases and new technologies to combat the challenge

Abstract

Improved sanitation, increased access to health care, and advances in preventive and clinical medicine have reduced the mortality and morbidity rates of several infectious diseases. However, recent outbreaks of several emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) have caused substantial mortality and morbidity, and the frequency of these outbreaks is likely to increase due to pathogen, environmental, and population effects driven by climate change. Extreme or persistent changes in temperature, precipitation, humidity, and air pollution associated with climate change can, for example, expand the size of EID reservoirs, increase host–pathogen and cross-species host contacts to promote transmission or spillover events, and degrade the overall health of susceptible host populations leading to new EID outbreaks. It is therefore vital to establish global strategies to track and model potential responses of candidate EIDs to project their future behaviour and guide research efforts on early detection and diagnosis technologies and vaccine development efforts for these targets. Multi-disciplinary collaborations are demanding to develop effective inter-continental surveillance and modelling platforms that employ artificial intelligence to mitigate climate change effects on EID outbreaks. In this review, we discuss how climate change has increased the risk of EIDs and describe novel approaches to improve surveillance of emerging pathogens that pose the risk for EID outbreaks, new and existing measures that could be used to contain or reduce the risk of future EID outbreaks, and new methods to improve EID tracking during further outbreaks to limit disease transmission.

Impact of extreme weather events on the occurrence of infectious diseases in Belgium from 2011 to 2021

“…Although our analysis of 11 years of high-quality laboratory-confirmed surveillance data for an entire country provides new and relevant information on when to anticipate and plan for increases in infectious diseases, the effects of climate change need to be studied at a very specific and local scale, taking into account the existence of confounding factors such as human behaviour or levels of disease reporting, in order to provide evidence-based public health recommendations that can be translated into health policy. There is also a need for a better understanding, from a multidisciplinary perspective, of the biological phenomena underlying the impact of climate on pathogens [49].…”