Climate change may spur spread of Zika

As Europe and the United States brace for the likely arrival of the Zika virus from Latin America this summer, experts warn global warming may accelerate the spread of mosquito- borne disease.

Rising temperatures are a threat in more ways than one, they cautioned ahead of a major gathering of Zika researchers in Paris next week.

“Climate change has contributed to the expansion of the range of mosquitoes,” said Moritz Kraemer, an infectious diseases specialist at Oxford University.

Kraemer was the lead author of a study mapping the 2015 habitats of two warmweather species — both of which have gained ground in recent decades — known to infect humans with several viruses. Since 2014, Aedes aegypti, known as the “yellow fever” mosquito, has been the main carrier of Zika across Brazil, Columbia and other parts of Latin America, where it has infected several million people, according to the World Health Organisation.

Europe outbreaks

Most carriers of the virus show no symptoms. But Zika has also caused a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly, a devastating condition that shrivels fetal brains. It is also linked to a rare neurological disorder in adults.

The second species, Aedes albopictus, is similarly found along the world’s tropical belt, but unlike aegypti has also colonised some 20 countries in southern Europe since the early 1990s.

Over the last decade, the newly arrived albopictus has caused small outbreaks in southern Europe of dengue and chikungunya — viral diseases that provoke high fever, headaches, muscular pain and, in rare cases, death.