THE ECOLOGY, VIRUSES AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

EDITORIAL: NICOLAS KYNIGOS: ENVIRONMENTAL ADVISOR.

CIVIL RIGHTS PARTY OF CANADA.

The ecology and natural history of disease transmission, particularly by anthropods, involves the interplay of a daunting multitude of interacting factors that defy simplistic analysis.  The rapid increase in the incidence of many diseases world wide is a major cause for concern, but the principal determinants are politics, economics, human ecology and human behaviour.  We urgently need to reverse this behavioural pattern and create organized applications of  natural resources to reverse this rapid climate change crisis caused by toxic Co2 emissions, pharmaceutical & industrial water pollutants, all of these dangerous viruses are induced by loss of bio-diversity including land erosion, Arctic warming, floods and deforestation,.

Tropical disease will claim even more victims in the poorest tropical countries, eventually moving upward towards the north pole regions moving up to higher altitudes, and so on.  There is credible evidence that this process has already begun.  There is an increase in the death toll from malaria in the tropics, the disease is moving to higher altitudes, there are similar cases in Europe, Chikungunya fever has appeared in Italy and the mosquito that transmits this disease is native to Asia.  Epidemic cholera has appeared on the western seaboard of Latin America, most of these vulnerabilities are people in poorer countries placing blame on rich industrialized nations.

Climate and weather changes are often invoked as the dominant parameters of transmission, but the true significant can only be assessed in the prospective of this daunting climatic complexity.  Enteric infections kill nearly 2 million people per year.  According to the World Health Organization, they are the second highest cause of death from infectious disease  (WHO 2003).  Transmissions from person to person, either directly or through contaminated food, and water.  It is informative to examine the natural history of these contagious diseases in detail because this may also affect us in the near future in the same way it may have affected the extinction process of Neanderthals, reasons that are still unknown to science, their incidence is likely to change as a result of climate change and  toxic Co2 pollution increasing the risks.

A good example of this change is a second pandemic that reached England in 1854 and raged for more than two years.  John Snow’s classic epidemiological study, in which he pin-pointed a water pump as the source of local infections by mapping the distribution of cases (McLeod 2000), led to the creation of public health agencies, the introduction of sand filtration, chlorination of water, an extensive system of the 20th century, cholera and typhoid were relatively rare in London and in most of the economically advanced cities of western Europe and North America.

Cholera (Sack et al.2004) and typhoid (WHO 2007a) were the dreaded diseases of Dickens era, killing ten of thousands in pandemics that swept around the world.  These pandemics were a classic example of the role of transportation and human mobility in the dissemination of pathogens.  In the modern world today, this factor is ever more prevalent, the only major difference is in the mode, speed of transport, and sheer volume of traffic.  Ten global pandemics of cholera are recognized from the start of the 19th century until recent times.

The bacterial pathogen (Vibrio cholera) sailed from port to port in contaminated kegs of water and in excrement of shipboard victims.   The first cases to reach western Europe were in 1820. Sunderland, an industrial town in Northeast England, was hit in the winter of 1831.  Other British cities were also rapidly affected, as well as many in North-Eastern Europe and North America.  In one month, for example, 1,220 immigrants to Montreal, Canada, were dead on arrival, and the disease spread rapidly to Quebec and other cities, killing tens of thousands.