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Tackling climate change and deforestation to protect against vector-borne diseases

The spread of vector-borne infectious diseases is driven by a complex array of environmental and social drivers, including climate and land-use changes. Global and regional action is urgently needed to tackle carbon emissions and deforestation to halt future outbreaks.

In the past five years, unprecedented outbreaks of vector-borne infectious diseases have occurred worldwide, often in association with climatic and land-use change events. For example, Peru has experienced the largest dengue outbreak in its history this year, which coincided with Cyclone Yaku and a localized El Niño that caused unusually warm and wet conditions. Other climate extremes, such as Pakistan’s record-breaking monsoon season and catastrophic flooding in 2022, led to major outbreaks of dengue and malaria. Animals are also affected by these change events. Unprecedented outbreaks of Japanese encephalitis1 virus occurred in Australian piggeries in previously naive temperate regions and coincided with La Niña, which brought increased rainfall and warmer sea-surface and air temperatures in the summers of 2021 and 2022. In Brazil, the Yanomami Indigenous territory has experienced a humanitarian crisis marked by malaria, hunger, water contamination and violence following forest encroachment, mining and deforestation.

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Fig. 1: Multiple conditions must align to cause a vector-borne disease outbreak.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to members of the Mordecai Lab at Stanford University for constructive feedback on the manuscript and to N. Nova for creating Fig. 1. I was funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB-2011147, with Fogarty International Center), the National Institutes of Health (R35GM133439, R01AI168097, R01AI102918), the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. I would like to acknowledge the many authors whose work has expanded our scientific understanding of the impacts of global change on health.

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  1. Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Erin A. Mordecai

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Mordecai, E.A. Tackling climate change and deforestation to protect against vector-borne diseases.
Nat Microbiol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01533-5

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  • Published: 29 November 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01533-5

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