Fevered Planet: How a shifting climate is catalysing infectious disease

The article titled 'Fevered Planet: How a shifting climate is catalysing infectious disease' discusses how as temperatures fluctuate, animals migrate to different regions, providing pathogens with more opportunities to jump between hosts. The question posed is whether the next pandemic could be fuelled by an unstable climate.

With rising temperatures, everything transforms and disease emerges. As the thick ice melts and the seas and air warm, new life populates Arctic waters. Whales are migrating north, while grizzly bears, white-tailed deer, coyotes and other animals and birds are expanding their range into boreal forests to the south. However, the geography of disease is also shifting as novel pathogens affecting plants, animals and humans increase their range. New beetles are migrating north and devastating Siberian forests, Alaskan mammals are struggling as new ticks arrive and human habitations in northern Norway are infested by new insects.

This article is an excerpt from 'Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature', authored by the late John Vidal, who was the former environment editor for The Guardian newspaper. He reported for The Guardian for nearly three decades until his retirement in 2017. He passed away in October 2023. In Alaska, where winter warming has increased by nearly 4C in 60 years, the entire ecosystem is undergoing change. The sea ice is breaking up earlier than it used to, causing changes in the amount of phytoplankton – the minute organisms that drift around in water currents – at the bottom of the food chain. This has knock-on effects on fish and bird populations. Lakes are changing size, marine heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense, and mammals must seek new food sources. The author Edward Struzik reports 'a plethora of deadly and debilitating diseases' striking reindeer in Scandinavia and Russia, musk oxen on Banks and Victoria islands in Arctic Canada and polar bears and seals off the coast of Alaska. New pathogens are turning up everywhere. They may be strange pests in Malawian maize fields, a novel fungal infection appearing in the ear of a Japanese woman, an unidentified insect killing trees in Russia, or a new bacterium shrivelling the fruit of lemon trees in Florida.