WILDLIFE DISEASES TO SPREAD NORTH

Anchorage, Nov. 22: As the world's climate warms, parasite-carried wildlife diseases will move north, with animals in cold far-north and high-altitude regions expected to suffer the most dramatic increases, warns a study to be published in the journal Science.

The study projects increasing spread over the next five decades of wildlife diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses and infectious worms. There are serious implications for humans, said co-author Jason Rohr of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. "We do know that 75% of emerging infectious diseases have a wildlife origin," said Rohr, who runs an ecology and public health lab at Notre Dame.

"We should be concerned for our own health when we see studies suggesting that there could be increases in infectious disease in wildlife." Climate change is already causing a surge in wildlife diseases, the study notes. And people are already being infected with diseases coming from wildlife, including Covid-19, Rohr said.

The study supports the "thermal mismatch" theory of wildlife disease, finding that cold-adapted species are at increased risk when their habitats warm and warm-adapted species are at increased risk when their habitats cool.

It is based on records of 7,346 wildlife populations comprising 1,381 terrestrial and freshwater species, from tiny insects to big mammals across all seven continents. It uses past climate records and varying scenarios for future climate conditions over the next five decades to calculate trends for parasites spreading.