Climate change will drive animals towards cooler areas where their first encounters with other species will vastly increase the risk of new viruses infecting humans, researchers warned on Thursday. The modelling showed that the mildest climate change scenarios could lead to more cross-species transmission than the worst-case scenarios, because slower warming gives the animals more time to travel. It is not preventable even in the best-case climate change scenarios, and we need to put measures in place to build health infrastructure to protect animal and human populations,” Albery said. The study’s co-author Colin Carlson, a global change biologist also at Georgetown, said climate change is “creating innumerable hot spots of future zoonotic risk – or present-day zoonotic risk – right in our backyard”. “We have to acknowledge that climate change is going to be the biggest upstream driver of disease emergence,” Carlson said, “and we have to build health systems that are ready for that.”

Source: Ethiopian News April 29, 2022 02:39 UTC