Down with Disease

This is a highly-technical but engrossing talk given at Yale about infectious disease and climate change. Before watching this, I would have expected a more direct correlation between increased temperatures and increases in diseases like malaria, but it turns out the story is much more complex. For one, it seems malaria is not quite so happy to see higher temperatures as previously thought. Now, that would be good news for the broiling hot tropics (what little good news these areas can hope for), but possibly bad news for higher latitudes where the temperatures approach malaria's sweet spot. Also, wealth leads to less exposure to the natural world (indoor climate control, screened doors and windows, etc.), and therefore less exposure to vectors of transmission like mosquitoes, so, as the continent's economy improves, Africans may remove themselves from conditions which facilitate the spread, leading to a decrease in malaria, even were it the case that it preferred 40+ °C. But that reduction assumes climate change will not negatively impact the region's economic growth, something Kevin Lafferty points out in the video is rather presumptuous. See? Like many things in science, it gets complicated quick. We can be thankful dedicated professionals like Lafferty take the time to conduct field research and draft complex analyses in an effort to quantify and understand all the factors and variables involved. We can also be thankful scientists like Lafferty appreciate that computer models greatly aid the effort, rather than disparage them. Notice how heavily Lafferty relies on them for predictions in his basic parasitology research and for understanding climate change impacts such as disruptions of host/parasite populations. Splitting the baby in situations like this must drive deniers mad. After all, in order to maintain the denier delusion that computer models of the climate are inherently flawed and worthless, they have to willfully ignore their usage/efficacy elsewhere in science, such as parasitology.