Zeitschrift für Infektionskrankheiten und Therapie

Abstrakt

Global Warming Could Change the Spectrum of Viral Infections in Europe

Sirwan Salman Sleman

In the last decades, changes in the global temperature have become a major concern and have found to produced serious impacts on the prevalence of infectious diseases among animal and human populations and increasing health risk in the future.

This is described partly due to change in a geographic distribution of and creating new opportunities for invasive vector-borne pathogens such as mosquitoes, ticks, sand-flies, rodents and other animal and birds, to transmit the infections into new areas and new hosts. For example, outbreaks of Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus and some other viruses worldwide, particularly in Europe. In addition, the warm climate may also alter the pattern of the diseases through decrease in the host resistance (immunity) to infectious disease and this may destroy the existing infrastructure of public health and increase health risks with the emergence of unexpected epidemics in the future.