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Perfect Storm of Perfect Plagues
Guess what else global climate change can do? Create a perfect epidemiological storm with enough power to take heretofore innocuous diseases and turn them into perfect plagues. A new study in Plos ONE reveals how extreme climatic conditions can alter normal host-pathogen relationships, causing a "perfect storm" of multiple infectious outbreaks to trigger epidemics with catastrophic mortality.
Outbreaks of canine distemper virus (CDV) in lions in 1994 and 2001 resulted in unusually high mortality of lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater. In the past, CDV epidemics caused little or no harm to the lions. But the outbreaks of 1994 and 2001 were preceded by extreme droughts that caused Cape buffalo to become heavily infested with ticks. When the lions ate the buffalo, they consumed unusually high levels of tick-borne blood parasites.
In the drought years, the CDV suppressed the lions' immune systems and also combined with the heavy levels of blood parasites. The merger created a fatal synergy. In 1994 more than 35 percent of Serengeti lions died. About the same number perished in the Ngorongoro Crater in 2001.
Unspoken but implied: Our own little witch's brew of ticks and viruses is waiting for wetter or hotter or dryer or fierier years to come together and make us suffer too… The world is too complicated for the simpletons who've been running it and, alas, there is no bloodsucker that feeds on stupidity.
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.
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Oh this is wonderful. Reduce the population. The CIA made progress with AIDS in Africa(according to Obama's Pastor Wright). Now the CIA will make more progress with global warming. Burn that Coal. India and China takes all the Coal that we can send them. Coal has gone up in price much faster that oil.
I'm moving to Mars.
zqahtt, I been there, it is no better. It is better in one of the moons, of Jupitor,e.g. Europa. But that is for another story.
This story exemplifies the latest series of pests and plagues breaking down the web of life: Colony Collapse Disordier (CCD) in honeybees suggests the pathogen brew we spew into our environment is affecting species across the board, high and low. What stuns me, however, is the stupidity of those people who shrug and say, What's it to me if bees disappear?
Duh. Say goodbye to one third of our food source, i.e., fruits, nuts and vegtables. Cotton, too, unless you want to hand-pollinate.
As for there being no bloodsucker that feeds on stupidity, I humbly disagree. Corporate fungi like Monsanto gorge themselves on the vapid stupdity of mindless consumption to ensure nothing intervenes with their endless environmental rape.
Thanks MJ - that's really cheered me up!