Bizarre, Unexpected and Devastating Consequences of Climate Change

When we think of Climate Change we think of warmer weather, rising seas, increasing wildfires... Unfortunately recently I have been reading about new unexpected diseases that can have devastating consequences. Here are a  few:

A mysterious kidney disease may be the first pandemic caused by climate change

A mysterious disease is killing tens of thousands of farmworkers globally — and the worst may be yet to come...
In a recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Cecilia Sorensen, an emergency medicine physician who also teaches at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, called this unexplained kind of kidney failure a "sentinel disease" in the era of climate change.

The disease, described as chronic kidney disease (CKDu), "grows with environmental exposures (to heat and humidity) that are directly influenced by climate change," she said.

It has made kidney failure the second-leading cause of death in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Climate change and infectious diseases – a partnership made in hell?

In their paper in mBio, Arturo Casadevall and colleagues, explain how warmer global conditions have reduced the temperature gradient between the environment and our body temperatures, making the ‘jump’ from one to the other easier for fungi  – and this is mainly why the yeast Candida auris has emerged as a global human pathogen and is being touted as the first to emerge as a result of climate change (it is also highly anti-fungicide resistant making matters even more complicated).

What of other pathogens? Well, the spread of many bacterial and viral diseases is influenced by where their vectors (carriers, who do not themselves suffer from the infectious diseases) are to be found. Extreme weather events and warmer temperatures mean that water-borne and insect-borne pathogens have migrated further than where they were normally found. In the aftermath of hurricane Florence in North and South Carolina back in 2018 there were huge swarms of mosquitoes in the states – flooded streets became a haven for them. The mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus spread to wider geographic regions fueled by warmer temperatures, as Madeline Thomson, University of Columbia, explained in her interview with On Health.

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy (NY Times)

The rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat: drug-resistant germs.

Flesh-Eating Bacteria Is Infecting More People And Spreading To New Areas. Scientists Blame Climate Change.

Pollutant Linked to Climate Change Accelerates Lung Disease