A statement you keep seeing in stories about global warming:
>"But we did not expect this to happen so soon," he said.
-----
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-disease25feb25,0,948803,full.story
Los Angeles Times
Global warming: enough to make you sick
Rising temperatures are redistributing bacteria, insects and plants,
exposing people to diseases they'd never encountered before.
By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2007
CORDOVA, ALASKA - Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the
bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid
waters of Prince William Sound.
The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the
Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.
But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature
had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark.
Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming
down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting - the first cases of Vibrio
food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.
"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his
oyster farm that year along with a few others.
As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the
bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.
"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate
change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr.
Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division
of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak.
The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome
subplots in the story of global warming. Incremental temperature
changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects
and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never
seen before.
A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000
about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease
outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change.
The temperature change has been small, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit
over the last 150 years, but it has been enough to alter disease
patterns across the globe.
In Sweden, fewer winter days below 10 degrees and more summer days
above 50 degrees have encouraged the northward movement of ticks,
which has coincided with an increase in cases of tick-borne
encephalitis since the 1980s.
Researchers have found that poison ivy has grown more potent and lush
because of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In Africa, mosquitoes have been slowly inching up the slopes around
Mt. Kenya, bringing malaria to high villages that had never been
exposed before.
"It's going to get very warm," said Andrew Githeko, a vector
biologist who heads the Climate and Human Health Research Unit at the
Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu. "That's going to mean a
huge difference to malaria."
Githeko, 49, grew up in the central highlands in a tiny village near
the town of Karatina, about 5,700 feet above sea level.
His home was different from most of Africa. The air was damp and
chilly. On clear days, he could see the glaciers on Mt. Kenya, the
second-highest peak in Africa at 17,058 feet.
When he was a child, lowland diseases like malaria were unknown in
Karatina. But perhaps 10 years ago, a smattering of cases began to
appear.
He had long ago left his home to study the great plagues of Africa -
Rift Valley fever, malaria, cholera and others. The appearance of
malaria in the highlands, however, was a mystery worth returning home
for.
Githeko dispatched a colleague to collect mosquito larvae in puddles
and streams around Mt. Kenya, some as high as 6,300 feet. Tests later
identified some of the mosquitoes as Anopheles arabiensis, one of the
species that carry malaria.
Githeko's findings, published in 2006, marked the highest A.
arabiensis breeding site ever recorded in Kenya and was the first
published report of malaria infections in the central highlands, he
said.
He knew by watching Mt. Kenya's gradually disappearing glaciers that
his world was warming, and that lowland diseases would eventually
work their way higher. "But we did not expect this to happen so
soon," he said.
Githeko's work has been echoed in a small number of studies around the
world.
In 1996, health authorities reported a human case of tick-borne
encephalitis in the Czech village of Borova Lada, elevation 3,000
feet. Until then, the Ixodes rinicus tick, which carries the disease,
had never been seen above 2,600 feet.
The case caught the attention of Milan Daniel, a parasitologist the
Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education in Prague who has been
studying the movement of ticks in the Czech Republic for half a
century.
He scoured the Sumava and Krkonose mountains and found that the ticks
had migrated as high as 4,100 feet largely because of milder autumns
over the last two decades, according to a series of studies published
over the last four years.
From 1961 to 2005, the mean temperature in the Krkonose Mountains had
increased about 2 1/2 degrees.
"This shift of the ticks," Daniel said, "is clearly connected with
climate changes."
According to a landmark United Nations report released this month,
global warming has reached a point where even if greenhouse gas
emissions could be held stable, the trend would continue for
centuries.
The report painted a grim picture of the future - rising sea levels,
more intense storms, widespread drought.
Predicting the future of disease, however, has proven difficult
because of myriad factors - many of which have little to do with
global warming. Diseases move with people, they follow trade routes,
they thrive in places with poor sanitation, they develop resistance
to medicines, they can blossom during war or economic breakdowns.
"No one's saying global warming is the whole picture here," said Dr.
Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the
Global Environment at Harvard University. "But it is playing a role.
As climate changes, it's projected to play an even greater role."
In a Beltsville, Md., laboratory filled with bathroom-sized aluminum
chambers, U.S. Department of Agriculture weed physiologist Lewis
Ziska is peering into the future of one of the key components of
global warming - rising carbon dioxide levels.
CO2 levels have been on the rise since the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution more than 200 years ago. Today, they are at their highest
point in more than 650,000 years.
In the tightly sealed chambers, Ziska re-created pre-industrial
conditions by turning down the concentration of carbon dioxide to 280
parts per million. In another box, he simulated the present with 370
parts per million. In a third box, he pumped up the carbon dioxide to
600 parts per million, the estimate for 2050.
Much of Ziska's work has centered on ragweed, a noxious plant that
sets off allergy sufferers, such as Ziska himself. The weeds inside
the tanks suck up carbon dioxide. "It's like feeding a hungry
teenager," he said.
Collecting yellow pollen in plastic bags fitted around the plants,
Ziska found that current conditions produced 131% more pollen than
pre-industrial conditions. Future conditions produced 320% more.
"For us weed biologists, this is the worst of times and the best of
times," he said.
The impact of global warming has not been all bad. Researchers
recently found that rising temperatures have helped reduce some
diseases related to cold weather. One British study found that the
number of children infected with a cold-like virus known as
respiratory syncytial virus has been declining with warming
temperatures.
Combining meteorological data and emergency room admission rates from
1981 to 2004, physiologist Gavin Donaldson at University College
London found each increase of 1.8 degrees clipped three weeks off the
end the virus' winter season.
"A small amount of warming can go a long way, as far as changing
disease transmission dynamics," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of
Global Environmental Health at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Given the gradual pace of warming, there are also some chances to adapt.
After Prince William Sound's Vibrio outbreak in 2004, the state
required more oyster testing in some areas. In the last two years,
there have been only four cases of Vibrio food poisoning.
Life in Aguiar's remote inlet has largely returned to the way it was
before. This winter has been cold. Aguiar, a bear of a man with a
riotous beard, huddled inside the houseboat for warmth recently as
the temperature outside hovered around 20 degrees. The pale Northern
Lights pulsed over the snow-laced Chugach Mountains, and skins of ice
grew on the still water.
Come summer, Aguiar will start sending oyster samples to the state.
When the temperature hits about 55 degrees, he'll drop his oyster
baskets 60 or 100 feet in the water for about 10 days to clear out
the bacteria.
It's a solution he can live with in a warming world.
"It's not all evil," he said. "I just don't like to see rapid change."
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000
messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
