The climate crisis is also a health crisis

Newsletter Rising global temperatures are undoing hard-earned progress. Humankind has never been better at fighting diseases. Researchers are coming up with new vaccines and treatments at an astounding speed. But climate change is making public health gains a lot harder to achieve and undoing some of the worlds hard-earned progress. Consider the mosquito, which kills more humans than any other creature. Until very recently, fatalities from malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes, were on the decline. The widespread use of insecticides and bed nets had brought the number of deaths from malaria down to fewer than 600,000 in 2021, , from roughly 900,000 in 2000. But climate change has expanded the warm areas where the most dangerous species of mosquitoes, those that carry deadly diseases, can breed. As a result of those factors, and also because of the rapid evolution of mosquitoes, malaria deaths are once again on the rise, as my colleague Stephanie Nolen, The Timess global health reporter, writes in an and all the ways we have to fight them. And, its not just malaria. Increasing temperatures have also been a gift to Aedes aegypti, the mosquitoes that transmit dengue, Zika virus and chikungunya. Dengue infections have happened in places that had never seen the virus, like France, and have grown worse in countries that have long battled the disease, like and . The broader public health effects of climate change go beyond infectious diseases. Heat waves have pushed temperatures beyond what workers in Qatar , wildfires have made the air hazardous in parts of Canada and the United States, and floods have contaminated drinking water sources . We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and your Times account, or for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? . Want all of The Times? .