Climate change and the El Niño ocean warming effect are raising new concerns over public health around the world, as hotter and wetter weather helps the spread of infectious diseases.
This summer in the northern hemisphere was by far the warmest on record and the arrival of El Niño — in which the surface of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean heats up and causes global changes in temperature and rainfall — has focused experts’ attention on the health impacts of a volatile climate.
Some 58 per cent of all infectious diseases encountered by humans can be aggravated by climate change, according to a recent review by researchers at the University of Hawaii in the journal Nature Climate Change. They said it was necessary to cut the emissions causing climate change rather than adapt to the health consequences because there were more than 1,000 pathways in which climate hazards cause disease.