Month: February 2015

Hard Evidence: will climate change affect the spread of tropical diseases?

The Climate and Environment at Imperial blog has moved. View this post on our new blog 

By Dr Paul Parham, Honorary Lecturer in Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Many tropical diseases such as malaria, Chagas disease and dengue are transmitted to humans via mosquitoes and other carriers known as vectors. These vector-borne diseases continue to have a major impact on human health in the developing world: each year, more than a billion people become infected and around a million people die. In addition, around one in six cases of illness and disability worldwide arise from these diseases.

Malaria arguably continues to attract the most attention of all the vector-borne diseases by virtue of causing the greatest global disease burden.

The global health benefits of tackling climate change

The Climate and Environment at Imperial blog has moved. View this post on our new blog 

by Professor Paolo Vineis and Pauline Scheelbeek, School of Public Health

It is sometimes claimed that addressing climate change with proper policies is too expensive and could lead to a further decline in the economy. However, the co-benefits of implementation of climate change mitigation strategies for the health sector are usually overlooked. The synergy between policies for climate change mitigation in sectors such as energy use (e.g. for heating), agriculture, food production and transportation may have overall benefits that are much greater than the sum of single interventions (Haines et al, 2009).