Wheat stem rust causes the Grain is shriveled due to the damage to the conducting tissue, resulting in less nutrient being transported to the grain. Severe disease can cause straw breakage, resulting in a loss of spikes with combine harvesting. Losses are often severe (50 to 70%) over a large area and individual fields can be totally destroyed. Credit: USDA
It is common knowledge that bacteria, fungi and viruses grow and spread more rapidly in hot climates. In a warming world, many more locations are experiencing rising temperatures and extreme weather. And this, notes Nourishing the Planet Senior Researcher Danielle Nierenberg, is why rapidly spreading, virulent plant and animal diseases like South African wheat stem rust and Rift Valley Fever are “wreaking havoc on nutrition, household incomes, and the economic stability of entire regions.”
This is also why malaria is so persistent, in spite of various technologically advanced weapons designed to eradicate it, because as the medicines to fight disease improve, the diseases they fight mutate to resist or evade them. The result is malaria in Florida, which before 1966 had occurred only once in 50 years (after successful efforts to eradicate it at the turn of the century), but by 2002 had grown to hundreds of cases a year.
Today, adds Dr. David O. Carpenter, director of Albany University’s Institute for Health and Environment, there is additional, clear evidence that several tropical diseases that were previously not found in the U.S. are now common in the South and are spreading north.
“Dengue is only one example. But we may be soon seeing diseases like malaria in more northern areas as well.”
Of course we still have some control over malaria, which mankind has been battling for about 4,000 years. But what about newcomers, like the recent E. coli outbreak in Europe which affected about 2,200 individuals in 10 European countries and killed 22? What if, instead of being a foodborne pathogen halted with the suspension of product sales, it had been an emerging, antibiotic-resistant form of tuberculosis, or an airborne virus, sweeping the globe like the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic – a disease that killed more people in a single year than the 14th Century Black Death (Bubonic Plague) in its entire four-year reign?
Some say the European E coli bacteria are an evolved genetic descendant of a 2001 bug first found in Münster, Germany. Others, and not just a few, suggest the strain was engineered and released on an unsuspecting population. Either way, it has proved amazingly resistant to many different classes of first- and second-generation antibiotics.
This antibiotic resistance has recently been tied to the use of antibiotics in food animals, specifically chickens, according to a July 2011 report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases which identified virtually identical, multi-drug-resistant bacteria across the genetic spectrum, from chickens to people, which resisted even third-generation cephalosporins used to treat such former health scourges as meningitis, pneumonia and gram-negative bacteria like E. coli.
Not only are the bugs evolving faster than the weapons used to eradicate them, but humans are becoming less able to withstand disease. As Dr. Carpenter explains:
“Global warming, which is a part but not all of climate change, will increase the spread of chemical pollutants like PCBs and dioxins that suppress the immune system. This will increase the susceptibility of people to infectious agents”.
Add to this the massive dislocations predicted by rising ocean levels, crop failures, spreading drought and increasingly severe storms, and we are facing a future which both Nierenberg and Carpenter see – from their perspective working with pastoralist communities in Samburu, Kenya and St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, – as fraught with displacement, disease and starvation.