PARIS: Global warming will expose millions more people to malaria as parasite-bearing mosquitoes move to higher altitudes, according to new research into the health perils from climate change.
Tropical highland areas in Africa, Asia and central and southern America are particularly at risk, a study in the US journal Science said.
Malaria, which killed an estimated 620,000 people in 2012, is among a host of diseases that researchers warn will spread more easily thanks to global warming.
For Ethiopia alone, “a one-degree-Celsius increase in temperature will lift the area where malaria can occur by 150 metres,” Menno Bouma of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said.
“In this band, there live about six to nine million people. These people will be additionally affected, but also people that live a bit lower, where malaria is present but at a lower level. For those people, the malaria intensity is likely to increase.”
Bouma and a team scrutinised malaria records from the highland regions of Colombia from 1990 to 2005 and Ethiopia from 1993 to 2005.
They found that in warmer years, people living at higher elevations experienced more malaria infections than they do in cooler years.
“This is indisputable evidence of a climate effect,” said University of Michigan ecologist Mercedes Pascual.
AFP
