Sibylla Bostoniensis

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[Special content warning: discussion of existential threats to humanity. Highly depressogenic content. This might not be the best thing to read if you're given to despair or if despair is unsafe for you. Maybe give this post a pass if you are not in a place, emotionally, to handle it.]


Previous: Part 2: COVID-19




12.

All of the above – the conjunction of our coming up the population curve and just hitting the really challenging point, and our species getting walloped by COVID-19, and being substantially undermined in our capacity to handle further pandemics, to say nothing of lesser outbreaks – would be terrible under the best of circumstances.

But we don't live under the best of circumstances. We are living on the cusp of a global climate catastrophe.

Even if global warming had no direct or indirect effects on diseases, themselves – and it does, oh, it does – the social chaos that climate disasters will cause will do nothing to help us fight any disease.

Our medical and public health capacities are overwhelmingly predicated on the productive power of modern, industrialized manufacturing and global supply-chains. Also on organic components that are grown or harvested from living beings, some, astonishingly, uncultivatable and wild.

There is nothing about hurricanes downing power lines that makes it easier to run a factory that makes saline drips. There's nothing about a tornado ripping through your shipper's plant that makes it easier to get PPE where it needs to be. Flood waters do nothing good to pharmaceutical plants or hospitals.

There's nothing about refugees fleeing war that makes it easy to have quarantines. There's nothing about falling bombs that facilitates vaccination programs.




13.

2022 Sept 24: Bloomberg: "Disease-Spreading Ticks Keep Marching North as Weather Stays Warmer" [CW: Pictures] by Robert Langreth:

Blacklegged ticks and their counterparts abroad used to be confined to certain climates, especially milder and humid temperate zones such as coastal New England. Now, they’re present in places further north where they didn’t use to appear.

Researchers in Sweden were astonished when, in the 1990s, they discovered ticks creeping up the Baltic Coast and into the sparsely populated Northland. The disease-ridden prehistoric creatures brought north new cases of Lyme disease and other ailments. By 2009, the critters had reached the edge of the Arctic Circle.

In the mountains of the Czech Republic, ticks are now present above 1,100 meters of elevation; prior to the 1980s they apparently hadn’t been able to survive much above 700 meters. In the U.S., they have spread north and west from their strongholds in southern New England and Upper Midwest to the far northern reaches of Minnesota and northern New England.

And from there, they’ve just kept going. In eastern Canada, government researchers have found that ticks are encroaching north at a rate of up to 50 kilometers a year, bringing disease with them.

The relentless northward march is closely linked to mild winters and warming summers that gave ticks more opportunity to find hosts. [...]

In the U.S., those illnesses have more than doubled in recent years, to more than 47,000 cases in 2018 from 22,000 cases in 2004. Lyme Disease accounts for the bulk of this, but numerous lesser-known tick ailments are on the rise as well, including flu-like anaplasmosis and babesiosis, a malaria-like infection of red blood cells. Ticks can also transmit Powassan virus, the rare microbe that killed former North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 16 bacterial, viral and protozoan diseases that are transmitted by ticks in the U.S. alone, with several more that are mainly present in other parts of the world. And more are being discovered all the time. [...]

While most research has focused on the blacklegged tick and its European relative, other species of ticks are also roaming into previously colder climes, including the so-called lone star tick, which is linked to red-meat allergy and can spread rare but potentially deadly Heartland virus as well as ehrlichiosis, a flu-like bacterial illness. Long thought of as a southeastern tick, it has made big inroads into Long Island and southern New England in recent years. In July, researchers at the University of Illinois found to their surprise that lone star ticks harboring the Heartland virus had inched north and become established within 60 miles of Chicago, according to research published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. [...]

2016 Aug 18: Ecology and Evolution: "Climate change is the primary driver of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) range expansion at the northern extent of its range; land use is secondary" by Kimberly L Dawe and Stan Boutin:

[...] White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) have been expanding their range into the North American boreal forest over the last half of the 20th century. This has already altered predator-prey dynamics in Alberta, Canada, where the distribution likely reaches the northern extent of its continuous range. [...]

2013 Sep 27: Scientific American: "Mosquito-borne Diseases on the Uptick—Thanks to Global Warming" by Maria Ana Diuk-Wasser PhD:

While it’s still far less common, U.S. cases of mosquito-borne dengue fever—also known as “breakbone fever” for the feeling it gives its victims—rose by 70 percent in 2012 as compared with 2011. The CDC reports 357 cases of dengue fever in the continental U.S. in 2012, up from 251 in 2011. The majority, 104, was in Florida, but New York had 64 and California 35. Most of the infections were imported on people travelling to the U.S.—Puerto Rico played host to 4,450 dengue fever cases in 2012, up from only 1,507 in 2011. But some of the cases in Florida likely came from mosquito bites there. The virus behind dengue fever thrives in tropical and sub-tropical environments. The increased warming predicted for the southern U.S. along with increased flooding means dengue fever will no doubt be spreading north on the backs of mosquitoes into U.S. states that never thought they would have to deal with such exotic outbreaks.

West Nile and dengue fever aren’t the only mosquito-borne diseases on U.S. public health officials’ radar. Chikungunya, which hitches a ride on the ever expanding Asian tiger mosquito and can cause high fever, fatigue, headache, nausea, muscle and joint pain, and a nasty rash in humans, comes from tropical Africa and Asia. But cases have started appearing in Western Europe in recent years and are expected to make it to the U.S. East Coast at anytime. Likewise, Rift Valley fever, which brings with it fever, muscle pain, dizziness, vision loss and even encephalitis, was limited to Kenya only a decade ago but today has spread across the entire African continent and is expected to make an appearance in Europe and the U.S. soon.

2013 Nov 18: PLOS One: "Poleward Expansion of the White-Footed Mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) under Climate Change: Implications for the Spread of Lyme Disease" by Emilie Roy-Dufresne et al.:

Abstract:

The white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) is an important reservoir host for Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease, and its distribution is expanding northward. We used an Ecological Niche Factor Analysis to identify the climatic factors associated with the distribution shift of the white-footed mouse over the last 30 years at the northern edge of its range, and modeled its current and potential future (2050) distributions using the platform BIOMOD. A mild and shorter winter is favouring the northern expansion of the white-footed mouse in Québec. With more favorable winter conditions projected by 2050, the distribution range of the white-footed mouse is expected to expand further northward by 3° latitude. We also show that today in southern Québec, the occurrence of B. burgdorferi is associated with high probability of presence of the white-footed mouse. Changes in the distribution of the white-footed mouse will likely alter the geographical range of B. burgdorferi and impact the public health in northern regions that have yet to be exposed to Lyme disease.

2018 October 22: Journal of Mammalogy: "Migration and recent range expansion of Seminole bats (Lasiurus seminolus) in the United States" by Roger W Perry:

The Seminole bat (Lasiurus seminolus) occurs throughout the southeastern United States, and recent evidence suggests they may be expanding their range in North America. I used museum records, publications, and data derived from mist-net surveys conducted by various individuals and organizations to determine changes in the seasonal and historical range of Seminole bats over the past 48 years across eastern North America. Based on records obtained, Seminole bats spend winter along the Gulf Coast, Carolinas, and southern Arkansas, but migrate as far north as Missouri and Kentucky during the summer maternity season. During the autumn juvenile-dispersal period, Seminole bats undergo widespread, long-distance movements and have been recorded in unexpected locations, including the Caribbean, Wisconsin, and New York. Over the past 48 years, the northern edge of their range has advanced 521 km and the western limit of their range has advanced 185 km, at a rate of approximately 11 km/year northward. These data suggest a recent and rapid shift northward, likely in response to climate change, and an expansion westward possibly due to changes in vegetation communities across historic grassland regions.

14.

We humans are not as separate from the natural world as we like to imagine ourselves. Covid taught a lot of people the painful lesson that we're not exempt from history. A lot of people haven't yet picked up on the extra credit lesson: we are not exempt from nature, either. Our fates are bound up in the fates of other species.

We have a nasty tendency to think that climate change's effects on other species are unfortunate for them, without entertaining the possibility that what we are doing to them might also turn out to be unfortunate for us. "How tragic for the poor polar bears", we think, without it ever crossing our minds, "How fortunate for our mortal enemy, Aedes aegypti."

We are not accustomed to thinking of animals as threats to us. We humans tend to an anthropocentric view of animal-human relations wherein humans act upon animals: we are subjects, they are objects. We do not much like to imagine animals acting upon us; that is an inversion of what we like to suppose is the natural order. Caught up in this mindset we find it so preposterous a proposition that what critters out there do might have consequences for us, that it surprises and shocks us, and even outrages us.

This is why there's an entire branch of the horror movie genre premised on, "What if a kind of animal could pose a substantial threat to us? Wouldn't that be wacky and terrifying? Probably it would involve radiation or something, because its not like that would happen naturally."

One of the unfortunate consequences of this bias in our thinking is that we have a psychological blindspot about the ways that the health – in every sense – of wild animal species is connected to our own health and, shall we say, biological security.

We imagine our actions have consequences on other species, without imagining these consequences on other species of our actions could redound back on us. But they do, and they will.




15.

2022 Aug 8: Nature Climate Change: "Over half of known human pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change" by Camilo Mora, et al. Abstract:

It is relatively well accepted that climate change can affect human pathogenic diseases; however, the full extent of this risk remains poorly quantified. Here we carried out a systematic search for empirical examples about the impacts of ten climatic hazards sensitive to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on each known human pathogenic disease. We found that 58% (that is, 218 out of 375) of infectious diseases confronted by humanity worldwide have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards; 16% were at times diminished. Empirical cases revealed 1,006 unique pathways in which climatic hazards, via different transmission types, led to pathogenic diseases. The human pathogenic diseases and transmission pathways aggravated by climatic hazards are too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations, highlighting the urgent need to work at the source of the problem: reducing GHG emissions.

This scientific article is discussed in this popular press article:

2022 Aug 8: HuffPost: "Climate Change Is Supercharging Most Infectious Diseases, New Study Finds" by Chris D'Angelo:

More than half of all human infectious diseases in recorded history — Lyme, West Nile, hantavirus, typhoid, HIV and influenza, to name a few — have been exacerbated by the mounting impacts of greenhouse gas-driven climate change.

That is the sobering conclusion of a new, first-of-its-kind paper that combed through more than 70,000 scientific studies to pinpoint how an array of climate hazards have impacted 375 pathogenic diseases known to have impacted humans. A team of 11 researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa conducted the analysis, which was published Monday in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

“I have to tell you that as this database started to grow, I started to get scared, man,” Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at UH Manoa and the paper’s lead author, told HuffPost. “We just started realizing that this one single thing that we do — the emission of greenhouse gasses — can influence 58% of all of the diseases that have impacted humanity. You realize the magnitude of the vulnerability that we are under. I went from excited to terrified.”

Scientists have long known and warned that climate breakdown is supercharging infectious diseases, making them more frequent and dangerous. But the new paper quantifies the extent of that growing threat, concluding that a stunning 58% of all documented infectious diseases — 218 of the total 375 — have been aggravated in some way by one or more climate hazards associated with greenhouse gas emissions, including warming temperatures, drought, wildfires, sea-level rise and extreme precipitation.

Mora, et al, 2020:

While the conclusion that climate change can affect pathogenic diseases is relatively well accepted [2,3,4,5,6], the extent of human vulnerability to pathogenic diseases affected by climate change is not yet fully quantified. On one hand, it is increasingly recognized that the emission of GHGs has consequences on a multitude of climatic hazards of the Earth’s system (for example, warming, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, floods, sea level rise and so on; Fig. 1)[4,7]. On the other hand, there is a broad taxonomic diversity of human pathogenic diseases (for example, bacteria, viruses, animals, plants, fungi, protozoa and so on), and transmission types (for example, vector-borne, airborne, direct contact and so on; glossary in Text Box 1) that can be affected by those hazards. The combination of numerous climatic hazards by the numerous pathogens reveals the potentially large number of interactions in which climatic hazards could aggravate human pathogenic diseases[...]

Yet, with few exceptions[2,8], past studies about the impact of climatic hazards on human pathogenic diseases have commonly focused on specific groups of pathogens (for example, bacteria[9], viruses[10]), hazards (for example, warming[11], precipitation[12], floods[13]) or transmission types (for example, vector-[14,15], food-[16], waterborne[16,17]). This failure to integrate available information prevents the quantification of the full threat to humanity posed by climate change as it relates to pathogenic diseases. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by applying a systematic approach to screen the literature for the set of interactions in which climatic hazards have been linked to human pathogenic diseases.

Now, not all of the diseases studied were infectious diseases:

Whereas pathogenic diseases are commonly associated with transmissible microbes (for example, bacteria and viruses), here we took a broader definition of pathogens to ensure that we include non-microbial and non-transmissible agents that are causative of human illness (Methods, also ref. 18). For instance, reducing the scope to just microbes would have excluded plant and fungal allergens, which are aggravated by warming, floods and storms and are becoming a serious health problem for non-communicable outbreaks of asthma, skin and respiratory illness.

That's fair. But here we're discussing transmissible illnesses, so bear in mind their research reports on more than is pertinent in this discussion.

The research team dug through existing scientific literature on myriad pathogens — viral, bacterial, fungal, animal-borne and more — and found that warming temperatures negatively impacted 160 unique diseases, the highest of any climate impact analyzed. Extreme precipitation affected 122 diseases, followed by floods (121), drought (81), storms (71) land cover change (61), ocean climate change (43), fires (21), heat waves (20) and sea level rise (10).

16.

2022, HuffPo:

Mora stressed that that estimate, as alarming as it is, is conservative. The findings exclusively draw on cases with evidence linking climate hazards to infectious disease, he said.

Yes, it's conservative because it is constrained to cases with scientific evidence of climate hazards impacting infectious disease. It necessarily leaves out diseases that we merely suspect might be aggravated by climate change, or might reasonably surmise would be aggravated by climate change.

But it's also conservative in another way: it's conservative because it's constrained to known diseases.

You know, like exactly what COVID-19 wasn't.

Our fates are bound up in the fates of other species, including other species we know little about, and of which we may not even know the existence.

The more humans contact wild animals, the more risk of encountering a zoonosis, which is bad – and the more risk of encountering a novel zoonosis, which is worse.

"Novel": you remember that word. As in "the novel coronavirus", which is what we all called it before the name Covid-19 was coined.

Novel illnesses are ones to which no human has prior immunity; worse, they are diseases which, to our knowledge, no part of the human species has been previously evolved to resist. It is an anvil on which our species has not yet been hammered. There's no prior mass die-off of humans particularly susceptible to it to leave, us, their progeny, blessed by descent from the resistant.

If climate change's effect on known diseases is known unknowns, then climate change's effect on the as of yet unknown diseases is the unknown unknowns.

2022 April 28: Nature: "Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk" by Colin J. Carlson, et al. Abstract:

At least 10,000 virus species have the ability to infect humans but, at present, the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals[1,2]. However, changes in climate and land use will lead to opportunities for viral sharing among previously geographically isolated species of wildlife[3,4]. In some cases, this will facilitate zoonotic spillover—a mechanistic link between global environmental change and disease emergence. Here we simulate potential hotspots of future viral sharing, using a phylogeographical model of the mammal–virus network, and projections of geographical range shifts for 3,139 mammal species under climate-change and land-use scenarios for the year 2070. We predict that species will aggregate in new combinations at high elevations, in biodiversity hotspots, and in areas of high human population density in Asia and Africa, causing the cross-species transmission of their associated viruses an estimated 4,000 times.

2022 April 28: The Atlantic: "We Created the ‘Pandemicene’" by Ed Yong: "By completely rewiring the network of animal viruses, climate change is creating a new age of infectious dangers.":

For the world’s viruses, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could conceivably infect humans. Most do not, because they have few chances to leap into our bodies. But those chances are growing. Earth’s changing climate is forcing animals to relocate to new habitats, in a bid to track their preferred environmental conditions. Species that have never coexisted will become neighbors, creating thousands of infectious meet-cutes in which viruses can spill over into unfamiliar hosts—and, eventually, into us. Many scientists have argued that climate change will make pandemics more likely, but a groundbreaking new analysis shows that this worrying future is already here, and will be difficult to address. The planetary network of viruses and wildlife “is rewiring itself right now,” Colin Carlson, a global-change biologist at Georgetown University, told me. And “while we thought we understood the rules of the game, again and again, reality sat us down and taught us: That’s not how biology works.”

In 2019, Carlson and his colleague Greg Albery began creating a massive simulation that maps the past, present, and future ranges of 3,100 mammal species, and predicts the likelihood of viral spillovers if those ranges overlap. [...] And the results, which have finally been published today, are disturbing. Even under the most optimistic climate scenarios, the coming decades will see roughly 300,000 first encounters between species that normally don’t interact, leading to about 15,000 spillovers wherein viruses enter naive hosts.

“It’s a little harrowing,” says Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The study suggests that the alarming pace at which new or reemergent viruses have caused outbreaks in recent decades “is not some abnormal situation,” Menachery told me, “but what we should be expecting, maybe even with an acceleration.”

Carlson and Albery drolly nicknamed their study “Iceberg,” denoting a huge and mostly hidden threat that we unwittingly collide with. Indeed, their simulation revealed that mammalian viruses have already been dramatically reshuffled, to a degree that likely can’t be undone even if all carbon emissions cease tomorrow. The Anthropocene, an era defined by humanity’s power over Earth, is also an era defined by viruses’ power over us—a Pandemicene. “The moment to stop climate change from increasing viral transmission was 15 years ago,” Carlson said. “We’re in a world that’s 1.2 degrees warmer [than preindustrial levels], and there is no backpedaling. We have to prepare for more pandemics because of it.”

It's tempting to paste in here the whole of Yong's article discussing the Carlson et al. paper, because it is entirely to the point.

“You shake that like a snowglobe and you get a lot of first encounters,” Carlson said. [...] Every animal-borne disease will likely change in similarly dramatic ways.

[...]

The Iceberg simulation also showed that such events will be disproportionately common in areas that are likely to be settled by humans or used as cropland. “Species are going to move to spaces that are a little uphill and environmentally stable—and that’s where we have built cities,” Carlson told me. This unhappy coincidence means that the places where their viruses will explore new hosts “just happen to be our backyards.”

And as bad as this all is, the Carlson paper only studied mammals, and then only land mammals – so, for instance, bird flu is not included, nor diseases in aquatic mammals – and only studied viruses – not bacteria or fungi. So whatever they found, there's even more out there.

At first, Carlson and Albery assumed that the changes they simulated would occur in the later half of this century. But instead, their simulation suggested that we could be living through the peak era of spillovers right now. The problem will worsen as the world warms, but it’s plenty warm already—so most of the predicted viral reshufflings are either happening or about to. And to Carlson’s surprise and dismay, that remains true even if we successfully curb greenhouse-gas emissions henceforth. There are many good reasons to slow the pace of climate change, but the Pandemicene, having been unleashed, cannot be rebottled.

The revelations are “so large and heavy to behold that even as we were writing them, we didn’t want to,” Carlson said. But despite every attempt that he and Albery made to naysay their own work, the simulation kept spitting out the same results. They confirm that three of our greatest existential threats—climate change, pandemics, and the sixth mass extinction of wildlife—are really intertwined parts of the same mega-problem.

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Loose change:

If you're particularly interested in the proliferation of mosquitoes, you might be also interested in:

2017 Sep 30: The Official PLOS Blog: "Climate Change is Increasing Mosquito Habitat Ranges" which discusses two articles in PLOS One.

2019 Mar 28: NPR Goats and Soda: "CHART: Where Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Will Go In The Future" which has colorful animated maps.

2019 Mar 5: YaleEnvironment360 (Published at the Yale School of the Environment): "Climate Change Will Expose Half of World’s Population to Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050"

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The Great Age of Plagues
Table of Contents

• 0. Intro
• 1. Population
• 2. COVID-19
• 3. Climate Change – You are here
• 4. Climate Change, II
• 5. Conclusion

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