A Story of Infectious Diseases and Pandemics: Will Climate Change Increase Deadly Viruses?

Abstract

A pandemic is the deadliest event that most human beings experience, even more fatal than the great wars and severe hurricanes. The novel coronavirus in 2020, unfolding at the time of this writing, seems certain to kill far more than 1 million people worldwide. Will the ongoing climate change result in far more frequent outbreaks of deadlier pandemics? To answer this question, this chapter provides a review of how the world community successfully eliminated the smallpox virus during the twentieth century. Among the human-to-human transmitted infectious diseases, past experiences of the two climate/weather associated diseases are reviewed: influenza and malaria. Of the animal-to-animal transmitted infectious diseases, African cattle sleeping sickness is examined. The pandemics that emerged since the dawn of the twenty-first century such as the SARS, Swine Flu, MERS, and COVID-19 are compared with the deadliest pandemic of the twentieth century, the Spanish Flu. The former resulted in far smaller numbers of fatalities than the latter. The successful malaria eradication in developed countries as well as a negative statistical relationship between flu-related deaths and average temperature, in addition to the successful smallpox eradication experiences, shed a ray of hope to the humanity’s ongoing fights against deadly viruses.