The Disease After Tomorrow

[Watchman]

Many of us have spent the last two-and-a-half years worried about the health risks posed by other people. In the United States alone, more than 1 million have died from COVID-19, a painful consequence of how ill-prepared the nation was (and, in many ways, still is) for an infectious disease outbreak.

As the climate warms, more health risks will come not only from other people, but increasingly from the environment around us. We’re equally unprepared to handle those.

Some of these risks come from diseases that many of us are already familiar with: Lyme disease, for example, which is carried by ticks, or West Nile virus, proliferated by mosquitoes — both vector-borne diseases spread by blood-sucking arachnids and insects. But the environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE