More than half of diseases such as Zika and cholera are exacerbated by the climate crisis

In 2016, a remote community in northern Siberia began to get sick.

Dozens or thousands of reindeer have developedanthrax. This is a bacterialdiseasethat can cause fever, swelling, and vomiting. One child and at least 2,000 reindeer died.

The cause is believed to be theclimate crisis.

Scientists say that the unusually high temperatures of summer melted frozen larvaethat died of anthrax decades ago, releasing dormant spores into the air. I think it has had tragic consequences.

That's not the only climate crisis that has made people sick. According to a new study, 58% of human infections have been helped by climate-related disasters, from bacteria like anthrax to viruses like Zika and parasites like malaria.

This result highlights some of the secondary consequences of climate disasters, such as floods, storms and droughts that bring people into contact with illness.

The magnitude of the potential climate impact on disease means that this problem can only be corrected by attacking at the source, research authorCamilo Mora, University of Hawaii Manoa Tell the school geographer,Independent.

“We need to forget the idea of ​​adapting to climate change,” says Dr. Mora. “We need to act immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

To do this study, the team documented the relationship between climate hazards and disease. We have collected information from hundreds of research papers. They focused on all the different ways floods, warming and storms are associated with different pathogens, for example.

Some relationships between climate and illness are fairly simple. For example, floods can lead to cases ofleptospirosis,bacterial disease, which occur when people are walking in infected water.

However, floods can also hold long-term water, providing fertile habitats for mosquitoes and spurring related diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and malaria.

Some disease pathways are more indirect, but still associated with the climate crisis.

For example, lack of access to adequate health care after a disaster strikes a community can increase the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, the study authors said. I have.

In addition, some scientists believe that heat waves make the virus more adaptable to high temperatures and less susceptible to the body's exothermic reaction.

The link between climate crisis and illness was not completely one-sided — in this study, 16% of human infectious diseases could be mitigated by climate effects. I found out that there is sex. For example, after a drought, there may be less pool of accumulated water and less malaria.

But the reverse is also true. In the case of malaria, for example, the authors point out that drought can also increase the density of mosquitoes in the remaining puddles.

Dr. Mora says he was amazed at the sheer number of ways climate hazards have affected human illness. The paper found that there are more than 1,000 ways climate crises can exacerbate infectious diseases. This is a visualization ofby the authoron an interactive website.

That's why the depleted list needs to focus on the source issue of stopping greenhouse gas emissions, he says.

"I'm saying there's no adaptation to climate change," says Dr. Mora. “If there are 1,000 ways to protect yourself from climate change, forget about adaptation.”

He added: Do you want to play with fire? Go ahead and carry out all the climate change you need.

"But if we come to a conclusion, this is not what we want to mess with."