scholarly journals Subjective Attribution of Infectious Disease Outbreaks to Climate Change is Associated with Mitigation Behavioural Intentions and COVID-19 Recovery Policy Support

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jagadish Thaker
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Human Impact ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Attribution Theory ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Behavioural Intentions ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Scholars argue that personal experience with climate change related impacts has the potential to increase public engagement. Yet, previous studies, which have almost exclusively focussed on experience with extreme weather events, provide mixed results. Based on experiential learning and attribution theory, this article argues that unless individuals’ attribute an event as related to or caused by climate change, their responses may be misdirected. Results based on survey data from a nationally representative sample of the New Zealand public indicates that subjective attribution of infectious disease outbreaks to climate change and to the human impact on the environment is positively associated with mitigation behavioural intentions and policy support. In addition, political affiliation moderates the relationship between subjective attribution and mitigation policy support, indicating a higher potential for right-leaning compared to moderates or left-leaning respondents to learn about climate change through health-related climate change impacts. Helping people understand the role of human impact on the environment and climate change in infectious disease outbreaks is likely to increase public engagement.

scholarly journals Co-benefits associated with public support for climate-friendly COVID-19 recovery policies and political activism

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (05) ◽  
pp. A08
Author(s):  
Jagadish Thaker ◽  
Brian Floyd
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Collective Efficacy ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
National Sample ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Sample Survey ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Using Data

Scientists highlight that actions that address environmental protection and climate change can also help with reducing infectious disease threats. Results using data from a national sample survey in New Zealand indicate that perceptions of co-benefits of actions to address environmental protection that also protect against infectious disease outbreaks such as the coronavirus is associated with policy support and political engagement. This association was partly mediated through perceived collective efficacy. Local councils with higher level of community collective efficacy were more likely to declare climate emergency. Communication about potential co-benefits is likely to shape public engagement and enact policy change.

scholarly journals Natural disasters and infectious disease in Europe: a literature review to identify cascading risk pathways

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 928-935 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan E Suk ◽  
Eleanor C Vaughan ◽  
Robert G Cook ◽  
Jan C Semenza
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Cascading Effects ◽  
Cascading Effect ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Preparedness Planning ◽  
Post Disaster

Abstract Background Natural disasters are increasing in their frequency and complexity. Understanding how their cascading effects can lead to infectious disease outbreaks is important for developing cross-sectoral preparedness strategies. The review focussed on earthquakes and floods because of their importance in Europe and their potential to elucidate the pathways through which natural disasters can lead to infectious disease outbreaks. Methods A systematic literature review complemented by a call for evidence was conducted to identify earthquake or flooding events in Europe associated with potential infectious disease events. Results This review included 17 peer-reviewed papers that reported on suspected and confirmed infectious disease outbreaks following earthquakes (4 reports) or flooding (13 reports) in Europe. The majority of reports related to food- and water-borne disease. Eleven studies described the cascading effect of post-disaster outbreaks. The most reported driver of disease outbreaks was heavy rainfall, which led to cross-connections between water and other environmental systems, leading to the contamination of rivers, lakes, springs and water supplies. Exposure to contaminated surface water or floodwater following flooding, exposure to animal excreta and post-disaster living conditions were among other reported drivers of outbreaks. Conclusions The cascade effects of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, include outbreaks of infectious disease. The projection that climate change-related extreme weather events will increase in Europe in the coming century highlights the importance of strengthening preparedness planning and measures to mitigate and control outbreaks in post-disaster settings.

scholarly journals Health Workforce Strategies in Response to Major Health Events: A Rapid Scoping Review with Lessons Learned for the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Coates ◽  
Asli Oubah Fuad ◽  
Amanda Hodgson ◽  
Ivy Lynn Bourgeault
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Health Workforce ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Workforce Capacity ◽  
Workforce Strategies

Abstract Background: The early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic brought multiple concurrent threats – high patient volume and acuity and, simultaneously, increased risk to health workers. Healthcare managers and decision-makers needed to identify strategies to mitigate these adverse conditions. This paper reports on the health workforce strategies implemented in relation to past large-scale emergencies (including natural disasters, extreme weather events, and infectious disease outbreaks).Methods: We conducted a rapid scoping review of health workforce responses to natural disasters, extreme weather events, and infectious disease outbreaks reported in the literature between January 2000 and April 2020. The 3582 individual results were screened to include articles which described surge responses to past emergencies for which an evaluative component was included in the report. A total of 37 articles were included in our analysis.Results: The reviewed literature describes challenges related to increased demand for health services and a simultaneous decrease in the availability of the workforce. Many articles also described impacts on infrastructure that hindered emergency response. These challenges aligned well with those faced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the published literature, the workforce strategies that were described aimed either to increase the numbers of health workers in a given area, to increase the flexibility of the health workforce to meet needs in new ways, or to support and sustain health workers in practice. Workforce responses addressed all types and cadres of health workers and were executed in a wide range of settings. We additionally report on the barriers and facilitators of workforce strategies reported in the literature reviewed. The strategies that were reported in the literature aligned closely with our COVID-specific conceptual framework of workforce capacity levers, suggesting that our framework may have heuristic value across many types of health disasters.Conclusions: This research highlights a key deficiency with the existing literature on workforce responses to emergencies: most papers lack substantive evaluation of the strategies implemented. Future research on health workforce capacity interventions should include robust evaluation of impact and effectiveness.

scholarly journals Thermal mismatches explain how climate change and infectious disease drove widespread amphibian extinctions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy M. Cohen ◽  
David J. Civitello ◽  
Matthew D. Venesky ◽  
Taegan A. McMahon ◽  
Jason R. Rohr
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Laboratory Experiments ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Thermal Mismatch ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Mismatch Hypothesis

AbstractGlobal temperatures and infectious disease outbreaks are simultaneously increasing, but linking climate change and infectious disease to modern extinctions remains difficult. Thethermal mismatch hypothesispredicts that hosts should be vulnerable to disease at temperatures where the performance gap between themselves and parasites is greatest. This framework could be used to identify species at risk from a combination of climate change and disease because it suggests that extinctions should occur when climatic conditions shift from historical baselines. We conducted laboratory experiments and analyses of recent extinctions in the amphibian genusAtelopusto show that species from the coldest environments experienced the greatest disease susceptibility and extinction risk when temperatures rapidly warmed, confirming predictions of thethermal mismatch hypothesis. Our work provides evidence that a modern mass extinction was likely driven by an interaction between climate change and infectious disease.

scholarly journals Climate change effects on Black Sigatoka disease of banana

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1775) ◽  
pp. 20180269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Bebber
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Infection Risk ◽  
Black Sigatoka ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Pests And Diseases ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Black Sigatoka Disease

Climate change has significantly altered species distributions in the wild and has the potential to affect the interactions between pests and diseases and their human, animal and plant hosts. While several studies have projected changes in disease distributions in the future, responses to historical climate change are poorly understood. Such analyses are required to dissect the relative contributions of climate change, host availability and dispersal to the emergence of pests and diseases. Here, we model the influence of climate change on the most damaging disease of a major tropical food plant, Black Sigatoka disease of banana. Black Sigatoka emerged from Asia in the late twentieth Century and has recently completed its invasion of Latin American and Caribbean banana-growing areas. We parametrize an infection model with published experimental data and drive the model with hourly microclimate data from a global climate reanalysis dataset. We define infection risk as the sum of the number of modelled hourly spore cohorts that infect a leaf over a time interval. The model shows that infection risk has increased by a median of 44.2% across banana-growing areas of Latin America and the Caribbean since the 1960s, due to increasing canopy wetness and improving temperature conditions for the pathogen. Thus, while increasing banana production and global trade have probably facilitated Black Sigatoka establishment and spread, climate change has made the region increasingly conducive for plant infection. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: approaches and important themes’. This issue is linked with the subsequent theme issue ‘Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: epidemic forecasting and control’.

scholarly journals Health workforce strategies in response to major health events: a rapid scoping review with lessons learned for the response to the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Coates ◽  
Asli-Oubah Fuad ◽  
Amanda Hodgson ◽  
Ivy Lynn Bourgeault
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Health Workforce ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Infectious Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Workforce Capacity ◽  
Workforce Strategies

Abstract Background The early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic brought multiple concurrent threats—high patient volume and acuity and, simultaneously, increased risk to health workers. Healthcare managers and decision-makers needed to identify strategies to mitigate these adverse conditions. This paper reports on the health workforce strategies implemented in relation to past large-scale emergencies (including natural disasters, extreme weather events, and infectious disease outbreaks). Methods We conducted a rapid scoping review of health workforce responses to natural disasters, extreme weather events, and infectious disease outbreaks reported in the literature between January 2000 and April 2020. The 3582 individual results were screened to include articles which described surge responses to past emergencies for which an evaluative component was included in the report. A total of 37 articles were included in our analysis. Results The reviewed literature describes challenges related to increased demand for health services and a simultaneous decrease in the availability of the workforce. Many articles also described impacts on infrastructure that hindered emergency response. These challenges aligned well with those faced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the published literature, the workforce strategies that were described aimed either to increase the numbers of health workers in a given area, to increase the flexibility of the health workforce to meet needs in new ways, or to support and sustain health workers in practice. Workforce responses addressed all types and cadres of health workers and were executed in a wide range of settings. We additionally report on the barriers and facilitators of workforce strategies reported in the literature reviewed. The strategies that were reported in the literature aligned closely with our COVID-specific conceptual framework of workforce capacity levers, suggesting that our framework may have heuristic value across many types of health disasters. Conclusions This research highlights a key deficiency with the existing literature on workforce responses to emergencies: most papers lack substantive evaluation of the strategies implemented. Future research on health workforce capacity interventions should include robust evaluation of impact and effectiveness.

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