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The incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory and water-borne diseases is rising in Uruguay in tandem with climate change, while dengue fever and malaria lurk at the country's borders. Higher temperatures are encouraging the presence of insect vectors carrying diseases that were eradicated decades ago, experts say.Increasingly frequent spells of extreme weather particularly affect the health of the poorest, who live in overcrowded conditions in precarious dwellings lacking sanitation, in the shantytowns that have sprung up at an exponential rate since the 1990s in the Montevideo metropolitan area. Many of them are on low-lying land exposed to flooding. Diarrhoea, hepatitis A and leptospirosis are some of the most common illnesses resulting from flooding and inadequate disposal of human waste, the head of the Health Ministry's Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Carmen Ciganda, told IPS. "These diseases are not exactly caused by climate change, but they are associated with it and become more prevalent when there are floods or droughts," she said. At the Pereira Rossell Hospital, the country's main children's hospital, respiratory diseases climbed from 17.7 percent in 2003 to 23.3 percent in 2007, and leptospirosis cases increased from 64 in 2006 to 106 in 2007. But Ciganda warned of threats that so far have been kept at bay beyond the country's borders. "If our climate becomes more tropical, conditions will be more favourable for the vectors that transmit diseases like dengue, yellow fever and malaria," she said. The average yearly temperature in Uruguay has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 100 years, and spring and summer average temperatures are now higher than they were in the early 20th century, while rainfall has become heavier and more frequent in the last 50 years.

"Since 2007, the mosquito has been detected in the capital city. Longer summers, and the delayed onset of cold weather (in the southern hemisphere winter) until late May, mean that the mosquitoes do not go into hibernation and continue to reproduce for a longer time," the coordinator of the Departmental Emergency Committee in Montevideo, Daniel Soria, told IPS. He said frequent heavy rainfall, a result of climate variability, hampers the struggle to prevent dengue and other diseases entering the country. "When 50 or 60 millimetres of rainwater falls in less than half an hour, it overwhelms the sewer system in Montevideo, and people in the shanty towns suffer most," he said. "Flooding of the Miguelete, Pantanoso and Carrasco rivers, which flow across the city, causes a lot of erosion, so people are constantly having to be evacuated." In Uruguay, nearly 60,000 people were evacuated between 1997 and 2008, and over half a million were affected in various ways from floods following a 30 percent increase in rainfall. The trend is expected to worsen in future, according to official reports.

(Reuters)

The report links warmer temperatures to the spread of dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria and even human plague in Europe."Fundamental influences of climate change on infectious disease can already be discerned and it is likely that new vectors and pathogens will emerge and become established in Europe within the next few years," says the report by the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC).

The independent group is formed of 26 national science academies from across the European Union.

Venezuelan Health Minister, Eugenia Sader stated that the dengue epidemic covers almost half the world and the spike in the disease is owing to climate change. Speaking on State VTV channel, the Minister confirmed a 88% increase of dengue in the Americas. In Venezuela, she admitted, the increase in dengue cases is 69% as of May but Venezuela has the lowest death rate from the disease in the region, standing at 0.7%. The population has an important role to play in eliminating the threat of dengue transmitted by the the white-legged mosquito. People, she urged, must eliminate stagnant pools of water left in tins or in old tires and start using mosquito nets.

Sader said the effect of climate on spreading the disease is clear in Venezuela because Andean States have started reporting cases of dengue for the first time.

Most people in Cambodia depend on farming for their livelihoods. 84 percent live in rural areas. Many live in high risk areas from flooding, droughts and cyclones. Kim Rattana of Caritas Cambodia said, "One of the biggest challenges we are facing in our development work is the increasing occurrence of natural disaster. What we have achieved over many years is being destroyed by storms and washed away by floods." Last year, Typhoon Ketsana destroyed hundreds of homes in Cambodia. Caritas Cambodia had to provide 30,000 people with relief items and food. Low water levels in the Mekong this year, the lifeline that runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, are threatening the livelihoods of more than 60 million people who live along it. In Cambodia, drought has already destroyed harvests and made fishing very difficult.

People in Cambodia don’t have the resources to adapt. That means they are extremely vulnerable to extreme or unpredictable weather. Climate variability has also brought health risks for some of Cambodia's most vulnerable communities. People are vulnerable to diseases like dengue fever, typhoid and diarrhea. Cambodia’s Ministry of Health predicts that under changing climate conditions will increase incidence of malaria by as much as 16 percent. Poor infrastructures and high poverty rates make malaria treatment unaffordable for large segments of the population. Only 55% of the population has access to public health facilities.

For the first time in more than 65 years, dengue has returned the continental United States, according to an advisory the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued in late May.

The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world's population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change.

The risk is set to increase. A report in the medical journal Lancet, which looked at the impact of climate change on the global distribution of dengue fever, found that nearly 5 billion to 6 billion people will be living in land suitable for transmission by 2085.

New Weather Patterns Threaten U.S. Breadbasket

The Midwest climate has already become wetter and warmer, said Gene Takle, an atmospheric scientist at Iowa State University.

One of Takle's studies used Iowa's experience to show the stress already showing up in the Midwest states, which are major food exporters to other countries as well. For example, precipitation has risen gradually in Iowa over the past century, but can vary widely from year to year. Springs now are wetter, and autumns drier. That can make corn-planting difficult, but dry the grain more quickly in the fall. Records show a rise in absolute humidity, threatening crops with a higher risk of disease and harmful fungi.

The new report shows that over 80% of the whitebark pine forests of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana are already dead or dying.

“The red and grey trees littering the western landscape are a testament to the fact that North America’s forests are under assault,” said Louisa Willcox, senior wildlife advocate for NRDC and one of the minds behind a new report on whitebark pine mortality in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. “Climate change is hitting the whitebark pine hard by allowing mountain pine beetles access to previously inhospitable forests at higher elevations.  Whitebark, which grows from roughly 8500 feet up to treeline, has never had to fight off a threat like this, and if we don’t act quickly, we could lose this essential tree species.”

Unfortunately for those dependent wildlife species, such as squirrels, chipmunks, grosbeaks, crossbills, and grizzlies (especially in Yellowstone) as well as other creatures, whitebark pine forests are being decimated throughout their range by an array of threats that have emerged in high-elevation environments, as a result of climate change, particularly now swarming mountain pine beetles, as well as an invasive nonnative disease, blister rust.

A 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at codfish catch records over four decades. It concluded what fishermen who know this cold-loving fish would have predicted: As the bottom water temperature increased, the probability of catching a cod decreased.

Last year, a federal effort to coordinate research, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, found ocean warming already was forcing a migration of some species.

"The northward shifts we have seen in the area are due in part to climate change. We are starting to see some of the effects of global climate change in our area," said Janet Nye, a NOAA researcher working out of Woods Hole, Mass. She studied historical fish records and found that of 36 northwest Atlantic species, almost half had moved northward in 40 years as water temperatures warmed. She predicted the traditional stocks of cold-water fish are likely to be replaced by croaker and red hake, fish normally found farther south.