From the EUROPEAN COMMISSION JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE and the “you should see mosquitoes in Alaska at 40 degrees F” department.
Spurred on by climate change, international travel and international trade, disease-bearing insects are spreading to ever-wider parts of the world.
This means that more humans are exposed to viral infections such as Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Zika, West Nile fever, Yellow fever and Tick-borne encephalitis.
For many of these diseases, there are as yet no specific antiviral agents or vaccines.
Global warming has allowed mosquitoes, ticks and other disease-bearing insects to proliferate, adapt to different seasons, migrate and spread to new niche areas that have become warmer.
These are the findings of a JRC report that aims to raise awareness about the threat posed by the spread of arboviruses (arthropod-borne viruses).
The growing spread of arboviruses
Aedes mosquitoes spread several arboviruses, including Dengue, Chikungunya, Zika, West Nile and Yellow fever viruses.
These mosquitoes thrive in urban settings due to the lack of natural predators and the ready availability of food and habitats in which to procreate.
They have existed in Africa and Asia for many years and are now becoming more and more widespread.
They have recently become established in some European countries and the Americas, largely as a result of international travel and trade.
Their alarming spread poses a problem for public health. They are difficult to eradicate – their larvae can survive for months, even in suboptimal humidity and temperature conditions.
The tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) has been found in several European countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden and, more recently, the Netherlands.
One of the more recently reported vectors for the virus, the Dermacentor reticulatus tick species, is rapidly spreading through Europe. It has a high reproduction rate, is cold resistant and can live underwater for months.
Humans can be infected by a tick bite or through consuming unpasteurised dairy products that do not meet EU safety standards and have come from infected animals. Luckily, TBEV can be vaccinated against.
Zika virus – a serious concern for Europe
Zika virus has received a lot of media attention due to its association with neurological disorders such as Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) and the development of microcephaly (abnormally small head) in foetuses.
It is difficult to diagnose and there is no cure or vaccine. First identified in 1947 in the Zika forest of Uganda, its spread is a serious concern given the growing presence of its main vector, the mosquito Aedes albopictus, in temperate zones including Europe and America.
The first documented outbreak of ZIKV infection was reported in 2007 in Micronesia. Since then it spread to French Polynesia and Brazil, where it infected up to 1.3 million people in 2015.
More than 70 territories worldwide have confirmed autochthonous (indigenous) cases of ZIKV. By March 2017, 2 130 Europeans were reported to have travel-associated ZIKV infections.
Mosquito control strategies
The report describes and discusses several methods that have been used to control the spread of mosquitoes, including insecticides, mosquito traps, genetic modification, land reclamation and habitat surveillance.
Currently, the safest and most readily available and effective methods of controlling mosquitoes are mosquito traps (for relatively small areas) and nets, and the reduction of potential breeding sites (standing water).
While the research team behind the study advocate better control of mosquito populations, they also warn that it would be unwise to remove mosquitoes completely from the ecosystem.
They are part of the food web for some species, and pollinate many plants. Wiping them out completely could have negative effects on nature, and consequently on humans.
###
Full Bibliographic information: CONDUTO ANTÓNIO Diana Sofia, SANSEVERINO Isabella, POZZOLI Luca, LETTIERI Teresa, 2017. Toward Climate Change Impact: Vectors carrying viral infection. Publication Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. ISBN:978-92-79-80856-2, https://doi.org/10.2760/067022
Only one problem, there’s no real link to climate:
Oops! Hopes for climate linkage to mosquito population increases dashed by new study
Remember those claims of ‘global warming will increase dengue fever risks’? Never mind…
New study shows Malaria has little to do with temperature or climate, but more with household size
Study: Zika virus transmission isn’t as dependent on warmer temperatures as previously thought
All this latest PR pitch is about is “send more money”, IMHO.
DDT!
DDT for Mann
We are getting perilously close to discovering that Global Warming is responsible for the boil on Mann’s bottom. Oh wait. that’s just his head up his arse.
And the stick up his asz
Won’t work. People can eat spoonfuls of DDT with no ill effect. Obviously no un-necessary chemical is good, but DDT isn’t all that poisonous to anything but insects.
DDT!!
And drain the swamps.
I have tried to encourage the use of “ever changing climate”. That appears to be too difficult In order to balance the hysteria
So, how about “climate changes”. Note the simplistic truth.. just add the plural.
It will remove all the “teeth” from anthropogenic causes of changes greater than any human can cause.
The term “Climate Cycle” would reinforce/remind that natural ups and downs of climate on century time scales is what climate has always been all about. Yes, its warming, and has been since the end of the Little Ice Age, so any given year can compete for ‘warmest ever recorded’ since records only go back to the Little Ice Age. Climate is all about cycles – so when do we cycle back to global cooling? It WILL happen, unless of course one is a Climate Denier who doesn’t believe in cycles. That term puts it back on them, IMO, which is where it should be. Their extraordinary end-of-days claims demand a lot more extraordinary evidence than we’ve been seeing.
Here we go again with the mosquito. Must be getting hard to find something new to blame on AGW so now they’re recycling old and defunct claims. Never mind the man behind the curtain with the DDT, we’ve found the real culprit this time.
Don’t worry Mark, it will be extreme weather next week again!
mass migration of people will do as much damage to the population..
Komarno, Manitoba, about 70 km north of Winnipeg, The Mosquito Capital of Canada.
It is -6 C right now in Komarno, with night time lows of ~ -10 C for the next few weeks.
Mosquitoes though only come out of dormancy from the previous season’s dormant eggs and multiply when night time lows stay above 12 C. Which for Komarno is the months of June-August. But end of August, the cold nights start limiting mosquito breeding. The first frost in late-August/early September ends the mosquito season. Some arboviruses like West Nile virus can remain from season to season due to host bird population as a reservoir for the next year to restart an infectious cycle of disease transmission.
Other mosquito-borne diseases like malaria require the Anopheles mosquitoe which are temperature sensitive and easily eradicated from temperate climates (as they were from most of North America and Europe with DDT). In tropical climate Anopheles is impossible to fully eradicate, and then simply returns when control measures lapse.
Tick borne viruses/bacteria maintain ecological persistence season-t0-season by holding a disease reservoir in a mammalian host species, like the deer mouse in New England for both viruses (TBE) and pathogenic bacteria like Borrelia burgdorferei, the causative agent of Lyme disease.
It is highly unlikely that 2-3 deg C temperature change by 2100 will significantly alter any of those dynamics or ranges in temperate climates. What is likely is a lack of mosquito control and tick control in temperate climates as control measures lapse due to Green’s’ campaign against effective insecticides and other control measures.
Yes I say bring back DDT. Whatever its negative affects and none have been proven, it surely is less harmful than the 1000s of other pesticides on the market.
The other banned pesticides, such as chlordane, dursban, etc. really do pose long-lived hazards for homeowners. New pesticides like fipronil are non-toxic to most non-targeted organisms. This is also what the latest studies on DDT have shown.
Exactly. DO they ever consider the number of people who die from mosquito-borne diseases above the Acrtic Cirle each year? I think not, as that would be against their narrative. It’s just that, any place that gets warm enough at any time of year, gets mosquitoes. The US is not immune, it’s just that we wiped out mosquitos and malaria enough before the DDT ban that malaria has not made a comeback there.
Exactly, Higley. Here where it used to be called the gateway to the west the mosquitoes,ticks, and dreaded Buffalo Gnats (turkey gnats, blackflies) are at their worst during the colder, wetter periods of spring thru fall. The faster it gets hot, the quicker the ticks and biting gnats go dormant between generations. The gnats need clean, cold running water to reproduce.
Nonetheless, Malaria was pandemic in Russia before the 20th century.
This is out of the EU, but here on March 17 I’m pretty sure there are no worries about getting tick or mosquito bites in almost all of Europe right now because it is BELOW FREEZING just about everywhere!! Ditto the northern half of the US all the way to the North Pole. Ditto Japan north of Tokyo, all of Siberia, Eurasia and lots of other places where we have been expecting AGW to have us all outside in shorts and t-shirts celebrating the Spring while dodging our bloodsucking little friends.
@rbabcock
Despite being below or around freezing point i got (living at 52-3° N) several mosquito bites already and had to pull a tick out of my cat two weeks ago..
Sorry, banning DDT promotes the spreading of mosquitoes. Millions of people die each year due to Rachael Carlson and the junk science she promoted.
I strongly suspect one reason these illnesses are again taking root is that the long term effects of DDT have finally worn off.
co2islife March 17, 2018 at 12:23 pm
Sorry, banning DDT promotes the spreading of mosquitoes. Millions of people die each year due to Rachael Carlson and the junk science she promoted.
No, banning the excessive use of DDT in agriculture helped maintain its effectiveness for use in houses specifically against mosquitoes. This overuse (particularly with cotton) was rapidly making DDT useless against mosquitoes, once an immunity to DDT is in the population it tends to persist for a long time. Far from being banned DDT is promoted by the WHO for Indoor Residual Spraying programs.
Nice try, indoor use? That is a joke. Millions of sub-Saharan people, mostly children, die each year. Millions of lives lost do junk science.
Since the mosquitoes bite between dusk and dawn most cases of malaria in children are due to bites in the home. Hence the IRS program and insecticide nets for indoor use are very effective. DDT is very useful in the IRS program because as well as being an insecticide its smell repels mosquitoes.
By the way co2islife how would you deal with subsaharan malaria?
I grew up in Wisconsin…. I can deal with mosquitoes and ticks. I’m more concerned with the economic-blood-sucking human parasites known as climate change activists and environmental justice warriors.
You left out politicians, J Mac. They’re a different subspecies, but part of the same population group.
An instructive video on parasites and global warming:
How Parasites Work
Brilliant. Is that by the person who goes by the name of PsyTen on you tube? One accent sounds similar.
Ah yes, but… the acidification caused by carbon dioxide will dissolve the calcium carbonate in the arthopod’s chitin exoskeleton, leading to their demise. Thus saving Castle Grayskull and Eternia from doom.
And with with one bound he was free.
See how easy it is to play the Climate-Change game?
You’re welcome.
Come one, come all to the magical mystical climate change tour, where up is down, right is left, and climate change is mightier than any god. It can do logically contradictory things. Quickly, pour your dollars in the collection plate and you will be blessed with all the magic this science can provide. Forget logic, forget experiments, forget old-fashioned, science. It’s magic, magic, magic. Come one, come all to the magical musical mystery tour!
Unfortunately, stupidity does not protect you against the zika virus …
“…largely as a result of international travel and trade.”
Largely? Largely???? Try COMPLETELY!* Many of these diseases used to be common or somewhat common in developed countries, but were eradicated using pesticides, medication, etc. The only cases of measles or malaria that I have ever seen mentioned on the local news or in the local paper are cases that have been traced to people who recently traveled or immigrated to the area from places where such diseases are still common. The mosquitos are not flying across the Mediterranean or Atlantic on their own, even if it is a little warmer.
*Okay, West Nile probably came to America via crows or whatever, but the disease did not take hold because it was slightly warmer here. Malaria used to be endemic in much of the US and southern Europe, despite the Little Ice Age. Are people really trying to claim that if only it was slightly cooler, none of these diseases would spread?
Drainage was more important than pesticides and medication. What are now called ecologically important wetlands, used to be called malaria swamps.
Walter, right on!
+10
“They have recently become established in some European countries and the Americas, largely as a result of international travel and trade.”
This one sentence negates their entire premise, and would be the lede in responsible journalism.
But alas, International travel and trade (like climate revival meetings held in exotic locations?) is the culprit.
““They have recently become established in some European countries and the Americas, largely as a result of international travel and trade.”
This one sentence negates their entire premise,”
Yes, it does.
I recall reading about one case of malaria in the UK, where the patient [who I believe made a good recovery] was a publican (inn-keeper) near London Gatwick Airport. So far as was determined, he was probably bitten by an Anopheles mosquito that had travelled to the UK on a commercial airliner.
I think in the 1980s – but only IIRC.
No further linked cases were reported., that I recall.
Auto
Possibly, but not very likely. More likely there are resident Anopheles mosquitoes in marshy areas around the airport and visitors or returned travellers with malaria also resident in the area. That is all you need for ‘airport malaria’ – a local mozzie that can transmit it and a human infected with the malaria protozoans.
Bed bugs, brought to US by third world cultural practices.
Yeah, pretty much AllyKat. This report is bunkum, deliberate lies and malfeasance. Well, maybe I am being too harsh and they are just stupid. The spread (or re-spread) of arboviruses with human reservoirs and their vectors is all about international travel and trade and the degraded state of many public health authorities. I really do not understand why the various government agencies are allowing Aedes aegypti and albopictus to re-establish – but then I don’t understand why they are letting roads and bridges decay either. Maybe they are too busy saving the world from climate change.
Obviously global warming was particularly severe in Northern Russia in the 1920’s, when one of the worst malaria outbreaks ever recorded occurred (https://climateaudit.org/2005/08/30/mosquitos-malaria-and-the-ipcc-consensus/). The city of Archangel, just below the Arctic Circle, was particularly badly hit, with 30,000 cases and 10,000 deaths. The only explanation for this is that global warming started a lot earlier than anyone has hitherto suspected, and caused Archangel to become a tropical city for a few years/sarc.
I was in Kiruna a few weeks ago, still not tropical. Clearly, we need to pump out more CO2.
Zika is a threat to growing cells, e.g., embryonic brain tissues. But owing to its propensity to destroy growing cells, recent research on that particular organism is finding that it may have some value as a means of killing brain cancer cells.
http://veterinarynews.dvm360.com/when-nature-gives-you-zika-virus-cure-cancer-with-it
The worst outbreak of malaria was in Siberia.
What a nonsense
Some facts
1 malaria was present during ancient Roman Times (warming period) in Italy but was controlled . It increased to the horror level during Dark Ages ( cooling period) causing depopulation of popular resorts of Amalfi coast, decreased in Renessaince ( warming) , increased in Little Ice Age…
2 malaria was endemic and deadly in Russian North ( cities of Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, etc) up to 1930’s, then disappeared-never to come back. And that was despite the fact that there was significant warming then.. Maybe, temperature has nothing to do with that?
3 Central Asia had endemic malaria and cutaneous leishmaniasis until 1930’s, then disappeared never to come back
And many more examples.. such as malaria incidence on the island of Zanzibar..
The Romans were masters of hydraulic engineering. They drained the swamps and controlled malaria. Stalin used the slave labor of the zeks in the Gulags to drain the swamps.
“Environmentalists” oppose draining malaria swamps. They want you to die.
How do those bugs get the monies from the University grants? They must be getting money to backup the claims!
Amazing how global warming/climate change causes bad life to flourish: mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, roaches, bacteria, virus’s, weeds.
But good life faces increasing adversity: penguins, polar bears, butterfly’s, coral reefs, frogs, fish, humans, crops.
Maybe this means that bad life is tougher than good life.
Maybe it means that a century ago, the temperature of the planet, at 14 Deg. C and CO2 at 300 parts per million was the optimal level for good life on earth. If that’s the case, somebody forgot to tell the planet, since it’s been greening up greatly and most life is flourishing…. crops/food production setting records by a wide margin.
We are to believe that bad life is loving the current global temperature at 15 Deg C and asking for more but good life, just can’t adapt to the +1 Deg C increase over the last 100 years or the CO2 (which was dangerously low for plants) at 405 ppm.
With regards to tick born diseases. Reported cases really are rapidly going up with many people becoming seriously ill(if you are bit and don’t get sick-you often don’t report it).
As you can see from the link below with the geographical distribution of various tick diseases, the Northeast and Upper Midwest have the highest incidence for several tick caused diseases.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/resources/tickbornediseases.pdf
This is powerful evidence of no correlation with global warming/climate change. Ticks feed on warm blooded animals that live in wooded areas, then reproduce proficiently after a meal. Science is going to need to get creative to address this.
https://www.nature.com/news/the-growing-global-battle-against-blood-sucking-ticks-1.18227
This Nature article on battling ticks mentions that the lack of funding is slowing progress. Just the opposite in climate science………too much funding to study problems(whether they exist or not) resulting from human caused climate change. So we have thousands of studies that link problems to climate change(now assumed to be synonymous with “human caused” climate change) when there is none.
One can infer from this study, that cutting CO2 emissions(since the authors claim climate change is a factor) would help us in our battle against disease causing mosquitoes and ticks. It won’t.
What’s most interesting about CO2 and insects has nothing to do with human caused climate change. Insects that feed on our blood, like mosquitoes for instance, can track us from the CO2 that we res-pirate
http://www.caltech.edu/news/mosquitoes-use-smell-see-their-hosts-47338
Numerous insects detect and use CO2 levels in their local environment to modulate behavior in some amazing ways:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3887906/
All of these fears are based on a misunderstanding of basic biological epidemiology.
Mosquitoes are disease vectors — they do not cause diseases on their own. They transmit diseases from one human host (vary rarely an animal host) to another human. If there are no sick humans (no human with the disease) available for mosquitoes to feed on, acquiring the infectious agent (virus or microbe) that is then passed on to another human when the infected mosquito feeds again.
It is the spread of infected humans that is causing the spread of tropical diseases.
If there are no sick humans (no human with the disease) available for mosquitoes to feed on, acquiring the infectious agent (virus or microbe) then there is no disease passed on to another human when the infected mosquito feeds again.
Hey Kip –
Absolutely. Claims to the contrary are face-palms, yet they keep appearing in comments and even in scientific papers from individuals suffering from Climate Savior syndrome.
Paul Reiter is one of the most qualified individuals on the planet to discuss the matter.
Here is a paper he did some 17 y ago on the subject.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240549/pdf/ehp109s-000141.pdf
Kurt
@ Kip Hansen:
All of these fears are based on a misunderstanding of basic….SCIENCE.
Fixed that for you.
😀
KIp – mozzies do transmit a variety of zoonotic diseases to humans (West Nile for example – humans are not a reservoir, ditto for Ross River, La Crosse, various equine encephalitises and numerous other arboviruses), but the current hysteria about Zika, the dengues, malaria etc. is primarily to do with diseases with primarily human reservoirs. Infected human + competent vector = potential disease transmission. If someone with Yellow Fever is living in an area of the US with Aedes aegypti rampant, then things could get ugly quickly as I doubt many Americans have been vaccinated for Yellow Fever.
DaveW ==> Of course, you are right, I did try to include “(very rarely an animal host)” — maybe the rarely should have been occasionally or “in some cases”. What most people misunderstand is the concept of a “disease vector” and actually believe that the mosquito bites cause these tropical diseases.
They keep regurgitating the same nonsense again and again and again.
Malaria is not a tropical disease, it even occurred north of the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia 200 years ago. And it disappeared from most of Europe and North America long before DDT. It wasn’t DDT that stopped malaria, it was better housing. Where people get decent houses that keep mosquitoes out, malaria disappears. Malaria infection almost always happens indoor and at night, which is why mosquito netting or a little DDT inside the huts every few months is an effective protection. Incidentally Anopheles mosquitos are still quite common in Europe and the US, DDT or not, but they don’t carry malaria any longer.
And, no, Yellow Fever isn’t a tropical disease either. Remember that there was a big yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 that killed 10 % of the population (as well as in Baltimore 1794, in New York 1791, 1795 and 1798 and in Wilmington 1798). It is spread by Aedes aegypti which does require warmish summers and small water bodies to breed, so general sanitation and good drainage in cities works quite well to prevent it.
And as for TBE (Tick-born Encephalitis) it is most prevalent in Eastern Siberia, with the coldest winters outside Antarctica. It is often claimed that ticks can’t survive cold winters. Nonsense. The two worst places for ticks I have ever visited were Bratsk in Siberia and the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. Both places regularly have winter temperatures below -40.
In those tropical swamps of upstate New York, the same diseases killed many of the men digging the Eire Canal.
Cholera though, was more deadly on the drier Oregon Trail.
Panama Canal, Cuba (1898)? All these were deadly and the region was tropical – which clearly is what the writer is evoking.
Remember, very shortly after Mann was whitewashed by Penn State, he arranged a handy grant to Penn State from the fed’s to “study” tropical diseases being affected by Mann’s CAGW. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
RACookPE1978 March 17, 2018 at 5:27 pm
Remember, very shortly after Mann was whitewashed by Penn State, he arranged a handy grant to Penn State from the fed’s to “study” tropical diseases being affected by Mann’s CAGW. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Not true of course.
money talks. and buys friends in high places.
Not a lot of people know the magnitude of how bad these diseases were in the past. A good example is how you NEVER hear alarmists mention historical accounts like this – http://nutrias.org/facts/feverdeaths.htm
By that account the worst year was 1853, 7849 people died of yellow fever in New Orleans alone. That’s out of a population of about 170,000 back then so over FOUR PERCENT of their population!
Even more right on. It is not temp, it is doors and windows, less people at the countryside in one household, more drained, clean environment.
A lot of the resurgence/emergence of tick-borne diseases seems to be associated with increased populations of larval hosts (often rodents and often the primary disease reservoirs) and nymphal hosts (often larger mammals like deer). The increases of these host/reservoir populations result from landscape use changes – generally reversion to more ‘natural’ systems – and conservation measures. Interesting example of how doing ‘good’ can do bad, not to mention all the deer eating gardens and crashing into cars.
If there is such a thing as “catastrophic man made climate change”, why is it so difficult for the alarmists to find something catastrophic that can be attributed to it?
Nothing has happened outside of natural variability in all the decades of scare mongering.
The “fingerprint of man” is not evident.
Makes you think…
That’s only because mosquitoes are too impatient to wait for the global warmth to come.
“the Dermacentor reticulatus tick species, … is cold resistant”
It’s all the global warming snow that’s the problem.
I’m fine with mosquitoes and ticks. At least you can see them.
It’s noseeums that drive me to the brink of insanity. They’re like invisible great white sharks.
I think the eco system will be just fine if we somehow were to eradicate all ticks. Lets do it!
Take Away:
Mosquitoes = bad
Humans = good
Climate Change = Humans being bad
End Result: Feel guilty because we say you should although we don’t exactly know why cuz mosquitoes might be good, but we are bad….or are we good…but if mosquitoes are good that means we are bad, but we can’t be bad because mosquitoes are bad so that means we are good, but we aren’t good because we attack the planet thus creating conditions for the bad mosquitoes which makes us bad, but we can’t be bad because mosquitoes are bad……………ACK! *head explodes*
Summary = another climate alarmist gets trapped in their own twisted philosophy and thus removes themselves from the gene pool (and subsequent food source for the dreaded mosquito). Another reporter is completely confused and turned around and reports their confusion thus selling more subscriptions.
Alarmism destroyed with one graph –
http://www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/malaria_007.jpg
Wiping them out completely
≠===========
what about smallpox or polio? we are trying to wipe these out completely. why give mosquitoes a pass simply because they might also do some good?
do we give mass murderers a pass because they also contribute to worthwhile charities? how is this any different?
Smallpox and polio are diseases Fred. Mosquitoes are animals not a disease and they are a HUGE source of food for other animals especially fresh water fish. See malaria chart above – we are winning against it. Probably the single most effective means to fight malaria is to isolate infected humans from infecting mosquitoes local to populated areas. Netting and window screening go a long way to do that as well as to protect healthy humans from being bitten and it’s clearly working.
Prior to netting and education, bedridden infected persons were cared for by other family members in open huts. The infected person would get bitten hundreds of times per day producing swarms of infected mosquitoes thus wildly increasing the risk to the family and the entire village.
Original Mike M – I’m not aware of any studies showing that mosquito larvae are an especially important food source for any other animals. What you read about bats eating humongous numbers of mozzies is hogwash (swallows probably eat far more and any bat eco-locating only on something as small as a mozzie will starve) and although we can use some small fish as efficient mosquito-control agents in ponds and the like, there are lots of other food sources and no data to support any contention that they require mosquito wrigglers. Maybe some do need mozzies, but many of our serious vector mosquitoes either breed in containers/treeholes or temporary stands of water (after floods or snow melt) where there are no fish. Some insects, including some ‘good’ mosquitoes (Toxorhynchites spp. for example), would be stressed if bad mozzies disappeared, but it is quite likely that much of the rest of nature would be relieved. It isn’t just people who suffer from exsanguination and disease transmission by mosquitoes.
There is not much in this essay that is correct other than some mosquitos transmit disease. Not all Aedes species transmit the diseases repeatedly listed in the article. Aedes is a large genus. Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of yellow fever, dengue, Zika, Chik, etc. Aedes albopictus is a potential vector but not as efficient as aegypti. Both are domestic mosquitoes, meaning the evolved to live with humans. Aegypti came out of Africa with the slave trade. Albopictus came out of Asia with used tires. Seriously during the Carter days the USA was going to chip tires and use them as a power plant fuel. Somebody didn’t mention steel belted tires. So throughout the SE USA tires were imported from Asia to solve this “energy crisis.” We had large “tire farms” some of which caught fire. Albopictus was here. Anopheles species carry malaria. We had yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia and Boston in the 18th Century, during the Little Ice Age. Malaria was well known in Italy and southern Europe during the Roman Era. Dengue, yellow fever, malaria were common in the SE USA until WWII. Most epidemics were stopped by screening and draining. DDT was at first considered a miracle like penicillin. By the late 1950s most mosquitoes were resistant to DDT due to overuse by mosquito control, agriculture and home pest control. The spread of “emerging” mosquito vectored diseases has very little to do with climate change and a whole lot to do with rapid travel and the partly because of the naiveté of the environmental movement and their political friends. Zika came out of Africa to Brazil during the Soccer World Cup. A large percentage of people with Zika are asymptomatic even when viremic. So they get on a plane and within hours are any where in the world. If Aedes aegypti happens to be around well—–. Zika is scary to heath official just for those reasons. The real threat however is yellow fever. Yellow fever was epidemic in western Brazilian towns last year and was moving east. Biggest problem is the severe shortage of yellow fever vaccines. Vaccines for Zika, Chik, and dengue are more difficult to develop. Dengue for example comes in about four strains. Get one you are sick, get the second and you are sicker, get the third or fourth and it can become hemorrhagic.
Excellent summary.
So much hatred for the mosquito! They need protection from bats. Green energy to the rescue!
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/03/19-out-of-20-bats-hates-wind-turbines/
If the viruses are spreading, it has more to do with the increased ease of travel than it has to do with any changes in the weather.
And perhaps banning pesticides.