Study: Changes to planet fueling human, animal diseases
Global warming, invasive species noted as factors
Several large-scale, humandriven changes to the planet — including climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the spread of invasive species — are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals, and plants, according to a new study.
Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. for instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting lyme disease cases in north America.
But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life.
“It’s a big step forward in the science,” said colin carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. “This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss.”
In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease.
The new analysis, which was published in nature on Wednesday, focused on five “global change drivers” that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species, and habitat loss or change.
The researchers compiled data from scientific papers that examined how at least one of these factors affected various infectious disease outcomes, such as severity or prevalence. The final data set included nearly 3,000 observations on disease risks for humans, animals, and plants on every continent except for Antarctica.
The researchers found that across the board, four of the five trends they studied — biodiversity change, the introduction of new species, climate change, and chemical pollution — tended to increase disease risk.
“It means that we’re likely picking up general biological patterns,” said Jason Rohr, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of notre Dame and senior author of the study. “It suggests that there are similar sorts of mechanisms and processes that are likely occurring in plants, animals, and humans.”
The loss of biodiversity played an especially large role in driving up disease risk, the researchers found. many scientists have posited that biodiversity can protect against disease through a phenomenon known as the dilution effect.
The theory holds that parasites and pathogens, which rely on having abundant hosts in order to survive, will evolve to favor species that are common, rather than those that are rare, Rohr said. And as biodiversity declines, rare species tend to disappear first. “That means that the species that remain are . . . the ones that are really good at transmitting disease,” he said.
lyme disease is one oft-cited example. White-footed mice, which are the primary reservoir for the disease, have become more dominant on the landscape as other rarer mammals have disappeared, Rohr said. That shift may partly explain why lyme disease rates have risen in the United States. (The extent to which the dilution effect contributes to lyme disease risk has been the subject of debate, and other factors, including climate change, are likely to be at play as well.)
notably, the fifth global environmental change that the researchers studied — habitat loss or change — appeared to reduce disease risk. At first glance, the findings might appear to be at odds with previous studies, which have shown that deforestation can increase the risk of diseases ranging from malaria to Ebola. But the overall trend toward reduced risk was driven by one specific type of habitat change: increasing urbanization.
The reason may be that urban areas often have better sanitation and public health infrastructure than rural ones — or simply because there are fewer plants and animals to serve as disease hosts in urban areas.