Climate change brings risk of more infectious diseases in New Zealand

Xinhua: The number of New Zealanders being hospitalized with infectious diseases has surged in the last two decades, say researchers in a warning that the government must do more to understand the links between global warming and public health. More than a quarter of acute hospitalizations in New Zealand are resulted from infectious diseases, compared with only 18 percent in the early 1990s, said a statement from the University of Otago Sunday.

"A warmer, wetter and stormier climate has the potential to make this burden of serious illness significantly worse because of the biological and ecological origins of many infectious diseases. This potentially means both additional human suffering and additional costs to the tax-payer funded health system," said Nick Wilson, Associate Professorof the university's department of public health. A study conducted by the university showed "significant gaps in our knowledge" of the connections between climate change and infectious diseases, said Wilson.

Much more effort should be made by government agencies and researchers into the possible increase of infectious diseases because of climate change. "While climate change is having impacts on the environment, it is also critical to understand its current and potential impacts on human health, including infectious diseases," said Wilson.

One of the highest priorities identified by the study was the need for better understanding of the risk of mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever, carried by insects from tropical countries. Many New Zealand habitats could be colonized by new mosquito species as temperatures and rainfall increased, it warned….

Frying Pan Lake in New Zealand. Original uploader was Famelor from de.Wikipedia.org, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license