5 Diseases that are Thriving Thanks to Global Warming

The Heretic

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http://matador.org/5-diseases-that-are-thriving-thanks-to-global-warming/

Do you think tropical diseases only occur in developing countries? Think again.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says diseases are spreading to temperate regions thanks to global warming.

Warmer temperatures and greater moisture extend the geographic range and season for disease-vector organisms such as insects and rodents. Below are diseases that could have you feeling the sting of global warming.

Malaria

Malaria is spread by the Anopheles mosquito infected with the Plasmodium parasite. Warmer and wetter climates trigger increased mosquito abundance, biting rates, activity level, and accelerated incubation of their parasites. Winter temperatures must drop below 16ºC to prevent a malaria outbreak the following spring.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that warmer temperatures will put 65% of the world’s population at risk of infection—an increase of 20%. This news is especially frightening in light of increased resistance to the chloroquine treatment drugs. Malaria has already hit Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York.


Dengue Fever

Dengue fever is spread by the Aedes mosquito infected with the Flavivirus virus. The geographic range of the mosquito is limited by freezing temperatures that kill larvae and eggs, thus limiting transmission to tropical and subtropical regions.

With no vaccine, “breakbone” fever is considered the most serious mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans.
But studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture predict dengue’s encroachment upon temperate regions due to small increases in temperature.

The mosquito has spread as far north as Chicago and the Netherlands and to higher elevations of the Andes. With no vaccine, “breakbone” fever is considered the most serious mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans.

Encephalitis

Encephalitis is an arthropod-borne disease present in many forms, including St. Louis, equine, La Crosse, and West Nile. New York experienced outbreaks of both West Nile Virus (WNV) and St. Louis encephalitis in 1999 during its driest and hottest spring and summer in a century.

Those weather patterns favorable to outbreaks—heat and drought followed by heavy downpours—will likely occur more often with global warming. Small stagnant pools of water that accompany drought are big enough to support breeding mosquitoes but not populations of the frogs that prey on them.


Bubonic Plague

Bubonic plague is spread by rodents and their fleas infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that global warming promotes outbreaks of “black death.”

A 1ºC increase in springtime temperatures is predicted to lead to more than a 50% increase in the prevalence of the bacterium.

A study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reports a 60% rise in plague cases in New Mexico following wetter than average winters and springs. Wetter conditions enhance food resources for rodents and promote flea survival and reproduction.

Cholera

Cholera is a waterborne disease present in drinking water and food contaminated with the bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. The WHO links the spread of cholera with increases in sea surface temperature, sea level rise, and El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

The U.S. EPA reports that algal blooms, which can be accompanied by cholera, become more frequent with warming temperatures. Cholera-harboring zooplankton also proliferates in warmer water temperatures.

What you can do

The IPCC warns that global warming will result in human mortality from infectious disease. Unlike the typical U.S. approach of emergency response to epidemics, a preventive approach would preclude unnecessary suffering, infection, and loss of life.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides information on prevention, vaccines, and epidemics. Below are things you can do to reduce your chance of infection.

Get vaccinated for cholera and yellow fever when visiting areas with epidemics.
Prevent exposure to mosquitoes and ticks. You can do this by: wearing long sleeves and pants, and avoiding outdoor activity between dusk and dawn during mosquito season.

Eliminate sources of food and nesting places for rodents and treat your pets for fleas.

Tell your doctor if you work outdoors or have exposure to disease-vector organisms. The symptoms of many diseases are similar to the common flu and are therefore misdiagnosed, especially by doctors in temperate regions who are unfamiliar with the diseases.

Do your part to help stop global warming and support environmental legislation. Stopping global warming will slow the spread of diseases and obviate the need for widespread spraying of dangerous pesticides such as Malathion.

Often policymakers do not take action on environmental issues unless it affects human health so maybe this will be their wake-up call to do something about global warming.
 
More alarmist stuff. Just what we need.

'The total number of human plague cases reported to WHO in
2002 by 13 countries was 1925, of which 177 were fatal. In 2003,
9 countries reported 2118 cases including 182 deaths. These
figures represent a decrease when compared with the annual
average figures (2895 cases, 206 deaths) for the previous 10
years (1992–2001), when 28 956 cases with 2064 deaths were
reported from 22 countries. During that decade, 80.3% of cases
and 84.5% of deaths were reported from Africa."

The global average temperature went up by only 1 degree C over the past 100 years, and, models notwithstanding, the average global temperature peaked in 1998, with the last four years showing year over year declines.

This article is trying to scare people, without providing any evidence that what they claim will actually come to pass. It's just conjecture, sprinkled with anecdotes. (Are they suggesting it never gets below 16 degress C in Michigan?)
 
What global warming?

Have you been to Michigan lately?
It's freezing-butt cold for the end of August.

2nd or 3rd year in a row this has happened.

Talked to a guy today who said his whole orchard is doing poorly because it's been so cold.
 
I hear you there, Fiesty, but you have to admit, it makes for nice sleeping :D
 
It sure does. But all the burning bushes and tree's should not already be turning fall colors this far South!

I live in the Grand Rapids area myself, and I was kinda shocked when I realized that the trees in this neck of the woods were starting to turn...
 
What global warming?

Have you been to Michigan lately?
It's freezing-butt cold for the end of August.

2nd or 3rd year in a row this has happened.

Talked to a guy today who said his whole orchard is doing poorly because it's been so cold.

Oh, that reminds me. It's almost cider time.

I'm losing a lot of leaves but they aren't changing yet.
 
Our orchards opened up for picking a few days back. I took the boys up there for our first apple picking trip of the season. It was wonderfully cool outside, not too hot, not too cold, really comfortable.

Fall is in the air *all happy*
 
In other news we are having the coldest decade in Chicago since the 30s.
 
What global warming?

Have you been to Michigan lately?
It's freezing-butt cold for the end of August.

2nd or 3rd year in a row this has happened.

Talked to a guy today who said his whole orchard is doing poorly because it's been so cold.
It's been a fairly cool summer here too.

But Global Warming is just that; 'global'. Local weather patterns will differ. Some will get somewhat colder, some warmer, some drier, some wetter. Overall temps will warm somewhat on average. All anyone has to do is look at the melting glaciers, icebergs and polar ice caps.
 
It's been cold for Aug. Two years ago winter broke almost every record for cold and snow. They are predicting a colder than avg. winter.

Those mosquitoes are screwed.
 
It's been a fairly cool summer here too.

But Global Warming is just that; 'global'. Local weather patterns will differ. Some will get somewhat colder, some warmer, some drier, some wetter. Overall temps will warm somewhat on average. All anyone has to do is look at the melting glaciers, icebergs and polar ice caps.

I read somewhere that though the N pole is getting warmer, but the S pole is colder with the ice getting deeper.
 
I read somewhere that though the N pole is getting warmer, but the S pole is colder with the ice getting deeper.

I read that, can't say if it's true or not. That isn't really the debate anyway. It's whether it's man caused and is it really harmful.
 
It's not Solar Cycle 24-

From 2002-

The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg. It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.

The lies and hysteria spread to defend the DDT ban are typical of the irrationalist, anti-science wave which has virtually destroyed rational forms of discourse in our society.

Sixty million people have died needlessly of malaria, since the imposition of the 1972 ban on DDT, and hundreds of millions more have suffered from this debilitating disease. The majority of those affected are children. Of the 300 to 500 million new cases of malaria each year, 200 to 300 million are children, and malaria now kills one child every 30 seconds. Ninety percent of the reported cases of malaria are in Africa, and 40 percent of the world’s population, inhabitants of tropical countries, are threatened by the increasing incidence of malaria.

The DDT ban does not only affect tropical nations. In the wake of the DDT ban, the United States stopped its mosquito control programs, cutting the budgets for mosquito control and monitoring. Exactly as scientists had warned 25 years ago, we are now facing increases of mosquito-borne killer diseases—West Nile fever and dengue, to name the most prominent.
 
It's been a fairly cool summer here too.

But Global Warming is just that; 'global'. Local weather patterns will differ. Some will get somewhat colder, some warmer, some drier, some wetter. Overall temps will warm somewhat on average. All anyone has to do is look at the melting glaciers, icebergs and polar ice caps.




... while at once ignoring any that might be growing, remaining the same, etc...





Globally, it's not warming; it's part of the sunspot cycle, one of which finally reappeared; a few more, and globally, things will warm up. It's been so thoroughly debunked that everyone else in the know has changed it to man-made climate change which simply eliminates the need to explain temperature of any sort. Sorta gets the Science out of the way in favor of consensus and harmony, just like those Chinese people do...




Imagine that Forrest!
 
Prevent exposure to mosquitoes and ticks. You can do this by: wearing long sleeves and pants, and avoiding outdoor activity between dusk and dawn during mosquito season.

My mosquitos seem to like the 4pm hour the best. That's when I go out to the garden to pick beans and tomatos and to provide a nice evening meal for about 20 female mosquitos while I'm at it.

Ticks don't seem to care what the hour or the day is. If you're anywhere that wildlife (rodents, deer) is, you're considered a good host.
 
Tell me this though -

The earth has been around for how many thousands of years?

And I'm going to assume that they didn't have the capabilities to measure all the ebb and flow of the poles and how thick the ice was, and that kind of stuff.

So how do we not know that this is just a natural cycle that it goes thru periodically?

There's no data from that long ago.
 
They're using ice core readings from the poles. Like reading tree rings. That gives them how much ice has fallen in any particular year, going pretty far back, and also what was in the atmosphere based on trace amounts of elements in the ice.

No measurements for anywhere other than the poles though.
 
Global climate change is one of those things that people can sit on either side of the line. It will be a historical hindsight look.

However, there are more people on this planet every minute. We can protect the planet or we can continue to ignore it. All the hype about the air in Bejing is a perfect example. We need clean air. We need clean water. We need to protect our planet and allow for the growth. We can't continue to pollute for any reason, we can't rely on finite resources to meet our needs.

Global climate change is one way for us to start looking at our impact on the longetvity of this planet. Is there really a problem with the protections that can be put in place in the name of Global climate change?

What are the ramifications?

Well, the factories have to clean up the stuff they put into the air. Hmmm. That creates new jobs that stay at home. Sure, it cuts into the stock holders payouts initially, but then production can be clean and still be profitable.

New, cleaner and renewable energy creates new jobs that stay at home.

I think you can look down the list of all the potential changes and really look at it as a win-win except for the people who are inflexible. We all need to be flexible and supportive of anything that can improve our planet because it will end up being better for our economy.

Sure it's pragmatic. Is that really a problem?

As far as the diseases, we are becoming more global. Not just our economy. Everything. That's one thing that can't be questioned. We may feel it differently than the tribal people in Africa, because we have the communications that they don't have, but I bet they have products from China just like we do.
 
When reductions in global warming are discussed, or the energy shortage, why is the one usefully solution overlooked? Population control.
 
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