I blame you if Lyme disease comes to this country
(Grist) From the known and treatable (Lyme Disease) to the unpronounceable and potentially deadly (Cryptococcus gattii), climate change is giving nasty diseases a leg up, clearing their way onwards to the U.S.
Um, really? Does Grist’s James West understand that Lyme disease has been in the US for a long time, and that it tends to affect more people in northern states? Where it’s cooler?
Increased rainfall, warmer temperatures, dying reefs, and hotter oceans are handing diseases that afflict humans — algal, fungal, mosquito-borne, tick-borne — a chance to spread, meaning diseases previously unheard in the U.S. of are now emerging.
As Tom Nelson wonders “how, specifically, would the alleged CO2-induced death of a reef cause disease to spread?”
George Luber, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says the deadly fungal infection C. gattii, once considered limited to places like Papua New Guinea and Australia, “popped out of nowhere†when it first moved to Vancouver Island around the early 2000s. Scientists were alarmed by its readiness to set up shop in a new climate, well outside its comfort zone. If subtropical C. gattii could settle down in just any backyard, what was next?
Obviously, diseases are supposed to be static, much like the Earth’s bio-system, at least in Warmist World.
