THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: One of the causes of the continuous outbreak of waterborne diseases like diarrhea, cholera and other epidemics in Kerala might be linked to climate change, says public health experts.
A study report published in the ‘National Library of Medicine’, an official website of the United States government reveals that climate change is threatening the progress made in global reductions of infectious disease rates over recent decades.
According to Dr GR Santhosh Kumar, a public health professional and general practitioner, the state health department must study why outbreaks of waterborne diseases occur at the same time from different districts.
“There is a possibility that climate change might be one of the causes of the continuous outbreak of epidemic and waterborne diseases. With the change in the climate changes are occurring in the pathogens also. Dengue and Rat fever are widely spreading in Kerala. The changes that occurred in the pathogens, our lifestyle changes and climate change should be studied,” he said.
In the study carried out by Karen Levy, Sharon M Smith and Elizabeth Carton on ‘Climate Change Impacts on Waterborne Diseases: Moving Toward Designing Interventions’ they said that climate change may alter the incidence of waterborne diseases and diarrhea in particular.
“Anthropogenic climate change has caused increases in the number of warm days and nights, and the frequency and intensity of both droughts and heavy rainfall events. This has implications for waterborne diseases, as high temperatures can alter pathogen survival, replication and virulence, heavy rainfall events can mobilize pathogens and compromise water and sanitation infrastructure, and drought can concentrate pathogens in limited water supplies,” the study said.
As diarrheal disease transmission is facilitated by insufficient or unsafe water, climate change has the potential to alter their distribution and incidence. Due to the large burden of diarrheal diseases, even small changes in diarrheal disease risk due to climate change can have profound impacts on population health”, the study said.
They also suggested that the research should shift to an area that evaluates the social and environmental contexts that make a population vulnerable to climate change. However, Dr. Santhosh Kumar pointed out that to achieve this, an effective surveillance system is needed.
“Earlier we had community-wise scrutiny and system’s scrutiny and both are in a deplorable stage now. We lost our control over the public health system. What we do now is like in cricket matches where we are successful in hitting sixers but we don’t know how to hold a bat”, he told TNIE.