Emerging Climate-Sensitive Infections of the North

As the terrestrial realms of the Arctic thaw with climate change, relative southern vector organisms such as ticks and mosquitoes may respond to the resulting landscape transitions by migrating northwards and transmit infectious diseases onto humans and animals of the far North. Expanding climate sensitive infections (CSI’s) constitute a serious global threat. To identify CSI’s, data concerning a selection of human and animal infections were procured from national health reporting systems to cover the current thirty-year climate reference period from western Greenland to the pacific coast of Russia, from approximately 55 to 80 degrees north. The diseases chosen to represent different transmission processes, as via vectors or via water, air, and soil, were borreliosis, brucellosis, cryptosporidiosis, leptospirosis, Puumala haemorrhagic fever, Q-fever, tick-borne encephalitis, and tularaemia. Inferential results indicate that 88% of these infections are changing systematically with respect to incidence levels and/or geographic distribution, and that they therefore should be considered as being potentially climate sensitive. It may hence be concluded that many northern societies are due to potentially changing CSI exposure. In addition, for each of the selected infections, the geographic distribution of their respective thirty-year average incidences was used to define “diseases climates” for future reference. Incompatibles across national health reporting systems are constraining the possibilities to infer international epidemiological trends.