There is growing concern in the scientific community that global warming and climate change will have a major impact on human health, particularly in Africa.
This is according to Barry Schoub, the executive director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg.
Schoub was presenting a Darwin seminar at the University of Cape Town medical school earlier this week on the potential impact of global climate change on human infectious diseases, with special reference to Africa.
He told the seminar that it has been speculated that infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and rift valley fever could spread because of global warming, raising fears that diseases that were previously thought of as only tropical or subtropical, may start migrating into cooler regions.
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"The concern is that global warming could expand the habitat of infectious diseases, because replication is enhanced by increased temperature," Schoub said.
However, he said that the interaction between climate change and infectious disease was a complex subject involving a variety of factors.
Those infectious diseases which could be affected by global warming, usually involve a number of hosts with several life cycles, making it difficult to know for sure how warming would affect the spread of disease, with non-climate-related factors playing a more important role.
But, while the impact of warming was hard to judge, it was clear that many diseases are directly affected by the weather.
Influenza, for instance, was restricted almost entirely to winter. Scientists are still not sure why this is the case.
"Here we have a disease almost directly related to the weather," Schoub said. Measles and rubella occurred largely in the latter part of winter and early spring, while rotavirus was primarily a winter disease.
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