As ClimateChange forces mammalian species to shift their habitats, a new modeling study predicts many animals will meet for the first time and swap viruses that could spark disease outbreaks in wildlife populations—and in humans as well.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that climate change will have an effect on the spread of infectious diseases, says Skylar Hopkins, a disease ecologist at North Carolina State University who specializes in parasites, and this “solid study” offers new insights. “They’ve given us a quantitative estimate of how big the risk is for viral sharing in wildlife and where it’s going to happen,” Hopkins says. “But we really don’t know what this means for human health.
Carlson’s team wanted to know how that might change in the decades ahead. Their models explored four scenarios for climate change, called Representative Concentration Pathways, which range from 2°C to 4°C increases and forecast how each would alter mammalian habitats and mingling. Then, they factored in which first encounters might lead to viral exchanges—only 6% of the possible pairs harbor viruses from the same families, suggesting those could swap pathogens at a future encounter.
For a concrete example, the team did a case study of Zaire ebolavirus, which they predict has 13 possible mammalian hosts based on known susceptibility factors. Adding in dispersal limitations of species, they estimate that the least dramatic climate change scenario could cause the virus to be involved in more than 2000 first encounters between two species, of which nearly 100 might lead to a jump from one species to the other.
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