Warmer EU hotspot for diseases

BRITAIN: Europe is facing a growing risk of new disease outbreaks - which may prove difficult to quickly detect and stop - as rising temperatures make the region more vulnerable to illnesses brought in by travellers and trade, a leading health expert says.

Tick-carried Lyme disease, for instance, is gaining ground from Russia to Britain to Croatia as temperatures rise, while dengue fever - carried in by travellers risks gaining a foothold in southern European countries such as Italy and Greece. West Nile virus and malaria are also concerning, as is Zika, scientists say.

‘‘The European Union is a hotspot for the emergence of communicable diseases, and is highly connected to other hotspots,’’ said Jan Semenza, who heads scientific assessment for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), based in Sweden.

With 590 million people arriving at European Union airports in 2015 - one of the busiest airspaces in the world - and changing climatic conditions in many parts of Europe making it easier for arriving diseases to survive and spread, the threat of one becoming established was growing, Semenza said.

Today, 61 per cent of public health outbreak threats tracked in Europe were driven by globalisation - including travel and trade - and environmental change, he said. What was particularly worrying was that only a few European countries - including Britain and Spain - said they felt their disease surveillance systems were up to the task of tracking the new threats.

The ECDC, established in 2005 in the wake of concerns about the spread of Asian flu and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), was getting better at tracking and predicting disease outbreaks ‘‘that could overrun the system - catastrophic events, things we can’t cope with’’, Semanza said. - Reuters