Climate Change & Infectious Diseases
Climate change has significant effects on many infectious diseases, often increasing the risk of outbreaks and transmission through multiple mechanisms. For example, climate change can enable the geographic spread of disease vectors such as ticks and mosquitoes, and heavy rains can create standing water that provides good breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Changes in climate can also alter both human and animal behavior in ways that increase the risk of disease spread. C-CHANGE is addressing these challenges through transformative research and key partnerships, including with the Northeast Regional Center for Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEVBD).
Cornell Public Health faculty conduct research on a wide variety of infectious diseases impacted by climate change.
Topics of special interest include:
- Zoonotic diseases, which are transmitted to people from animals, and vector-borne diseases, which are transmitted to both people and animals from blood-feeding arthropods, like mosquitos, ticks, biting flies, and fleas.
Faculty involved in this research
- The epidemiology, evolution, diagnosis, and prevention of bacterial, fungal, parasitic and viral diseases, including those caused by release of toxins, such as from harmful algal blooms.
C-CHANGE’s Center for Transformative Infectious Disease Research
With support from NIAID through the NIH’s P20 mechanism, C-CHANGE’s Center for Transformative Infectious Disease Research supports transdisciplinary, community-engaged research that produces predictive epidemiological models and interventions to prevent viral spillover and outbreaks of vector-borne diseases. By leveraging and integrating data, methods, and expertise across disciplines, C-CHANGE aims to shift public health practice from reactively responding to outbreaks to proactively preventing them.
Viral spillover from bats
This project is investigating how climate change affects the risk of spillover of zoonotic infections from bats and aims to identify evidence-based strategies to prevent disease emergence in multiple ecological settings. Specifically, researchers aim to:
- Identify the effects of climate change on bats’ health, diets, and viral infection dynamics and shedding in Australia and South Africa
- Understand how climate-driven changes in land-use and resource availability affect contact between bats, humans, and bridging hosts
Vector-borne diseases
This project is investigating how climate change affects the risk of vector-borne diseases through changes in both human behavior and vector competence for pathogen transmission. Specifically, researchers aim to:
- Identify and analyze risk factors for malaria and mosquito-borne arboviruses
- Understand the tick-borne disease pathogen dynamics between people and animals in communities in South Africa and New York State
Core resources
Living Evidence Applied Data Modeling Core (LEAD-MC)
The goal of LEAD-MC is to build capacity and develop tools to support transdisciplinary research among C-CHANGE researchers and collaborators. The LEAD-MC achieves this goal by:
- Building a federated database overlaid with integrated disease modeling, geospatial analysis, climate modeling, econometrics and policy analysis, epidemiological modeling, and modern data management and analysis to facilitate the creation of predictive epidemiological models
- Applying living evidence review methods to curate datasets using novel approaches
- Providing transdisciplinary modeling expertise to C-CHANGE researchers and collaborators through monthly presentations and on an as-needed basis
Community Engagement Core (CEC)
The goal of CEC is to foster collaborative research teams and enable community-informed research across C-CHANGE that will effect long-term positive change and community resilience. The CEC achieves this goal by:
- Establishing community-embedded action research partnerships
- Creating standard processes and venues for sharing community ideas, issues, needs, and concerns to C-CHANGE’s researchers
- Advancing partner communities’ scientific literacy in climate and One Health
- Aiding communities in using C-CHANGE data and research to spur systems change, including by sharing data and C-CHANGE research results in plain, action-focused language