Pirate's Cove

You know, because a slight temperature increase is going to make Canada like Panama, and these people are doomsday cultists, after all

Felled By A Warming World: Will Malaria Be The Next Pandemic?

The next global health crisis might not be another pandemic caused by a novel respiratory infection. Instead, we could see climate change dramatically increasing the threat from an existing infectious disease–for example, malaria, a disease that kills one child every minute of every day.

If only hysterics hadn’t created the conditions where countries most vulnerable couldn’t use DDT

Malaria, like other vector-borne diseases, reacts quickly to changes in climate, with epidemiology of the disease evolving rapidly in response to shifting rainfall patterns and warmer temperatures. Already we are seeing malaria cases at higher altitudes in places like Ethiopia and Kenya, where up to now low temperatures offered protection from mosquitoes. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, such as violent cyclones and unforeseen floods, lead to sudden surges in malaria infections and deaths. After the devastating floods in Pakistan, malaria infections more than quadrupled. Despite massive efforts, including additional emergency funding from the Global Fund, deaths from malaria soared, far exceeding the number of people who died from drowning or otherwise directly from the floods. Countries like Malawi and Mozambique, hit by Cyclone Freddy in February 2023, know that the floods and stagnant water resulting from such a storm create ideal locations for mosquitoes to breed and can quickly lead to sharp increases in malaria cases.

As always, it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who are the most exposed to such dynamics. There’s already an almost perfect overlap between the communities designated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “highly vulnerable to effects of climate change” and those most heavily hit by malaria. Ninety-five percent of malaria infections and 96% of malaria deaths occur in the World Health Organization’s Africa Region. Children under 5 account for over 80% of deaths, with pregnant women being the most at-risk adults.

If there wasn’t an effective ban on DDT, it could have been updated and made better and less dangerous to other insects. But, no, the extrem-enviros happened, along with a bad, anti-science book.

Influenced by these environmental changes, we are also seeing shifts in where different species of mosquito live and thrive. For example, Anopheles stephensi, until recently found largely in Asia, has now been identified across multiple parts of Africa. The Anopheles stephensi species adapts more easily to urban conditions than most mosquitoes, and unlike the Anopheles species currently most prevalent in Africa, can carry both types of malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. So malaria control programs in Africa now have to contend with both a new mosquito and a new malaria parasite.

That has nothing to do with Hotcoldwetdry and everything to do with global travel and trade. Also, how do these cults think life spread around the globe?

Confronted with such a perfect storm of simultaneous challenges, we face a frightening risk of seeing many of the hard-won gains of the last two decades of fighting malaria rolled back, with infections and death rising across the world, in places already hard hit, in those that thought they were rid of the disease, and in places that never suffered from it.

And this is all your fault. How dare you!