Climate change has the potential to make a substantial impact on a variety of health outcomes and has been viewed as a major public health concern for the 21st century; thus, literature on the topic of climate change and infectious disease tends to be topical and important. Climate Change and Infectious Diseases contributes to the burgeoning literature examining existing and potential health impacts of climate change.
The book compiles presentations from the 2009 international conference entitled ‘Climate Change and Infectious Diseases’, which brought together 120 participants from a range of backgrounds including leading experts and students in biology, infectious diseases, and climate change. The book is comprised of 15 articles written by 27 authors from varied backgrounds and is edited by an impressive list of the world's leading microbiologists. While the conference agenda outlines presentations on a range of topics, the book predominantly focuses on vector-borne viral diseases in humans and animals. Considering the book is only 119 pages, it manages to cover a variety of important vector-borne viral diseases that are often overlooked in climate-related health literature, including but not limited to arboviruses (e.g. dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, tick-borne encephalitis, rift valley fever virus) and orbiviruses (blue tongue disease virus, Africa horse sickness virus).
The book does not necessarily provide any novel ideas, concepts, or theories. Many authors mention the difficulty in linking climate change to health outcomes and discuss the links, if any, between current or historical weather patterns and disease. The authors generally acknowledge the potential for climate change to have a considerable impact on infectious diseases but indicate that ‘it is too early to identify or predict concrete consequences’, especially when considering other social, political, ecological, and economic factors impacting on infectious diseases.
The editors have allowed for considerable leeway in content, direction, and scope of each article, resulting in some redundancies, with some articles offering more interesting perspectives, novel contributions, discussion on climate change, and higher quality references than others. Nonetheless, this flexibility does result in a range of information provided, including vector-borne disease pathology, biology, ecology, epidemiology, and genetics. The first third of the book provides a lengthy overview of climate change and at times the flow of the remaining articles was confusing. Therefore, a summary providing an overview and roadmap of the book would have been useful. Finally, while the book does discuss infectious diseases from a range of countries and continents, the discussion of disease implications and significance tends to be Euro-centric.
This book might be more difficult to obtain for those outside of Europe, but is reasonably priced at €21.50 for a 119-page book. Compared to other emerging climate change and health literature, this book begins to highlight some overlooked vector-borne diseases in the context of climate change. It provides an overview for a broad scientific audience and could provide a foundation for multidisciplinary discussions. This book might be of interest to veterinary and human public health practitioners and researchers interested in vector-borne disease and One Health approaches – particularly those in Europe.
