Any correlation between climate change, global warming and emergence of new strains of viruses which cause Ebola, Marburg or similar highly contagious diseases?
Any scientific work is being done on this domain? Seeking expert advice only.
As I think, may be there is no direct correlation but obviously have to have some relations. Microorganisms are mutating regularly where climate change increasing the frequency. Even, Climate change may be making the organisms competent for pathogenic or resistance gene transfer.
Yes there is no direct correlation between emergence of unique filovirus strains and climatic alterations as far as the effect of global warming is concerned, however, the phylogeographic distribution and structure of Ebola virus are uniquely suited to humid equatorial rainforests/habitats of Central and Western Africa, where most of the outbreaks have been observed recently.
Many factors have been implicated to summarize and characterize the environments where Ebola viruses thrive; e.g., climatic characteristics, mean annual temperature, temperature range, frost, rainfall, solar radiation, habitat remodeling, and other factors of ecologic variations. The unique geographic distribution of filovirus disease spreads which encompasses vast areas of Central and Western Africa and mostly humid regions which supports this virus.
Nevertheless, most studies / authors have failed to delineate any link between changes in the above given factors of ecologic variations to outbreak of Ebola & Marburg infections.
This paper (Peterson et.al.,2004) predicted possible outbreak of Ebola virus based on GARP model, although they did not find any direct correlation between changes in ecologic conditions (parameters) to that of an outbreak. I think similar studies are on the way to examine if there is any role plalyed by ecological parameters in triggering Ebola outbreak.
Has any researcher studied the post Ebola outbreak analysis to link phylogeographic distribution and structure with climate change?
Ref:
Ecologic and Geographic Distribution of Filovirus Diseasehttp://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0125_article
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