Abstract
Climate change is influencing the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. As a result, hurricane seasons in different ocean basins have been increasingly intense. In addition to economic and human losses, hurricanes of great magnitude can cause alteration of fungal ecology, which facilitates contact between the fungi and people in the affected areas and leads to fungal diseases. Although to date, it has not been possible to record an increase in post-hurricane fungal diseases clearly, there is evidence that some fungal diseases, such as sinusitis, pneumonia, post-traumatic skin infection, endophthalmitis, keratitis, central nervous system infection, allergic rhinitis, conjunctivitis, asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis have occurred in people who have survived devastating hurricanes or who have participated in cleaning or rehabilitating infrastructures after a hurricane. Therefore, the competent authorities must implement appropriate actions to limit the anthropogenic effect on climate change and establish and disseminate measures to prevent and control fungal diseases in communities vulnerable to hurricanes.
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Abbreviations
- CO2:
-
Carbon dioxide
- IPCC:
-
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
- NCEI:
-
National Centers for Environmental Information
- NOAA:
-
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- WHO:
-
World Health Organization
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Acknowledgments
E.G.S thanks the Master’s Program in Health Sciences of Escuela Superior de Medicina, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) for a scholarship (reference no. 1025718). M.G.F.-D.-L., and G.A.-A. thank the CONACyT for the support to the realization of this chapter.
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García-Salazar, E., Betancourt-Cisneros, P., Frías-De-León, M.G., Acosta-Altamirano, G., Sánchez-Conejo, A.R., Barrera, F.L. (2022). Climate Change, Hurricanes, and Fungal Diseases. In: Frías-De-León, M.G., Brunner-Mendoza, C., Reyes-Montes, M.d.R., Duarte-Escalante, E. (eds) The Impact of Climate Change on Fungal Diseases. Fungal Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89664-5_12
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