Future Dengue Forecast: Intricate Relationships Between Mosquitoes, Virus and Climate Change Found

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2012) — Dengue fever most likely will become a disease the United States must learn to live with as climate change creates opportunities for the disease to gain a foothold.

But after careful study of the disease's characteristics, the mosquitoes that carry it and future climate change, two researchers at Texas Tech University said the impact on areas likely to experience dengue won't necessarily play out along the lines of conventional wisdom.

Their findings were published July 5 in Environmental Research Letters.

Many studies have looked at how climate change might alter the geographic range of the mosquito-borne disease and assume the disease will occur wherever mosquitoes that carry it are found. This generally leads to predictions that the disease will move northward as the climate warms.

However, Texas Tech researchers dug deeper to study climate constraints on the geographic range of the mosquito that carries dengue and the incubation characteristics of the disease within the mosquito. Factoring these into the equation, they found Southern outbreaks would decrease in size overall and become more common in the spring and fall while Northern areas could experience larger outbreaks throughout the summer.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120705151204.htm