Climate change allows the disease to infect more people

Sep 20, 2012 13:45 GMT  ·  By

In a paper published in the September 19 issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, experts at the San Francisco State University (SFSU) say that climate change is allowing birds infected with malaria to spread the disease at latitudes that were previously inaccessible.

The research shows that birds carrying the deadly pathogen have been discovered as far north as Alaska. Scientists say that an ever-warming climate will enable these birds to move even further north.

One of the most significant implications of the new findings is that we may soon witness a decline in Arctic bird species, on account of the fact that these creatures were never exposed to malaria before.

As such, they have no defenses against the insidious pathogen. These discoveries again highlight the need to mitigate the effects of global warming before the climate changes too much. Otherwise, an ecological disaster as major as the North Pole's melting ices could hit the Arctic.

Understanding bird malaria's spread patterns is absolutely critical towards figuring out how human malaria will move around the world as the atmosphere warms up. The effects of climate change on this pathogen has been only marginally studied thus far.

For this study, the team collected blood samples from birds at four sites in Alaska (Anchorage to the south, Denali and Fairbanks in the center of the peninsula, and Coldfoot in the north). The pathogen was found everywhere except Coldfoot, which lies some 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from Anchorage.

According to a model of how the diseases will spread under the influence of climate change, malaria will reach Coldfoot by 2080, the SFSU team explains. “Right now, there's no avian malaria above latitude 64 degrees, but in the future, with global warming, that will certainly change,” Ravinder Sehgal says.

The expert holds an appointment as an associate professor of biology at SFSU, and was a coauthor of the new paper. The lead author of the research was former SFSU postdoctoral fellow Claire Loiseau.

“Penguins in zoos die when they get malaria, because far southern birds have not been exposed to malaria and thus have not developed any resistance to it. There are birds in the north, such as snowy owls or gyrfalcons, that could experience the same thing,” Sehgal reveals.