Preliminary results will be presented from a series of research projects underway at Johns Hopkins and collaborating institutions to conduct an integrated health risk assessment of climate change. These include: 1) Heat-related mortality in the US; 2) Hantavirus, El Niño and risk predictions from satellite remote sensing; 3) Malaria and soil moisture modeling, Kenya; 4) Dengue fever, simulation models and climate downscaling ; 5) Water-borne cryptosporidiosis, extreme precipitation and runoff modeling; and 6) Cholera epidemics in Peru and coastal marine ecology.
Background information for these research initiatives are as follows: 1) mortality rates in the US are highest in the winter, however, determining cause of death is important to conducting a comparative study between summer versus winter mortality; 2) El Niño driven flooding in the American SW, enhances vegetative food sources for deer mice, the mammalian vector for Hantavirus; 3) the malaria parasite requires temperatures above 16 degrees C to develop and weather determines mosquito breeding sites and biting rates; 4) warmer temperatures shorten dengue virus development, further potentiating disease transmission; 5) drinking water contamination by <i>Cryptosporidium</i> could be affected by changes in water run-off in high risk agriculture-intensive watersheds; and 6) <i>Vibrio cholera</i> has been associated with marine zooplankton by R. Colwell and colleagues. Blooms from warmer sea surface temperatures accompanying El Niño, may contribute to causing epidemics.
Many of these case study analyses are highly integrated involving climate change simulation downscaling and hydrological and ecological modeling, which in combination constitute the driving forces for the public health outcomes. Historical validation studies will also be presented. In the case of water-borne diseases, we have conducted a historical spatial and temporal analysis of all US water-borne disease outbreaks from 1940 to 1994, to determine correlations with local rainfall. This study's results will be incorporated into an integrated risk assessment of climate change that combines an agricultural GIS, hydrologic run-off and climate modeling to examine cryptosporidiosis risk under future climate change scenarios for the Susquehanna River Basin and Chesapeake Bay drainage areas. Data on US water-borne disease outbreaks were obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Precipitation data for the analysis were provided by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC). In the case of dengue fever validation and modeling studies, data and models of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) were utilized. Funding support for these studies is from EPA’s Office of Research & Development and from the Office of Policy.