The appearance of infectious diseases in new places and new hosts, such as West Nile virus and Ebola, is a predictable result of climate change. It's not that there's going to be one Andromeda Strain  that will wipe everybody out on the planet. There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks putting pressure on medical and veterinary health systems. It will be the death of a thousand cuts. Each has observed the arrival of species that hadn't previously lived in that area and the departure of others, Brooks said.

Over the last 30 years, the places we've been working have been heavily impacted by climate change. Even though I was in the tropics and he was in the Arctic, we could see something was happening. Changes in habitat mean animals are exposed to new parasites and pathogens.Humans hunted capuchin and spider monkeys out of existence in some regions of Costa Rica, their parasites immediately switched to howler monkeys. Some lungworms in recent years have moved northward and shifted hosts from caribou to muskoxen in the Canadian Arctic. But for more than 100 years scientists have assumed parasites don't quickly jump from one species to another because of the way parasites and hosts co-evolve. Brooks calls it the parasite paradox.  Over time, hosts and pathogens become more tightly adapted to one another. According to previous theories, this should make emerging diseases rare, because they have to wait for the right random mutation to occur.

Regards
ALEX JOHN
Editorial Assistant
Journal of infectious disease and dignosis