In the May 2022 GeoHealth Hour, Dr. Cyril Caminade will talk about Pandemics, epidemics and environmental change: a complex relationship. The talk will be held online on Zoom, please use the registration link below.
Abstract
Infectious diseases affecting humans and animals have always played a significant role in history, facilitating the conquest of new territories and sometimes influencing the rise and falls of civilizations. Diseases that have developed into historical pandemics roughly fall into three categories. Plague, a vector-borne disease transmitted by fleabites, caused three large pandemics. The plague of Justinian affected the Eastern Roman Empire and its neighbors between 541 and 543 and is estimated to have killed about 100 million people. Cholera, a water-borne disease, caused seven large pandemics. The third cholera pandemic in 1846-1860 spread from India and caused the deaths of about 10,000 people in London alone. John Snow who identified water pumps as the source of infections in London, later became the father of modern epidemiology. Finally, respiratory diseases, like the 1918 Spanish influenza or the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, have significant impacts on population health and socio-economic factors. Vector-borne and water-borne diseases are climate sensitive. Rainfall provides breeding sites for vectors, and warmer temperatures, up to a certain limit, tends to shorten pathogen development time. Land use change also greatly influences the interaction between hosts and pathogens, recent epidemics of Ebola and COVID-19 are prime examples. This seminar will present a review of diseases with pandemic potential, their shown relationship with the environment, globalization and other risk factors over long periods and will discuss epidemics that are more recent.
About the speaker
Cyril is originally trained as a climate scientist, and he lately specialized on climate change impacts on health. He obtained his PhD about climate variability in Sub-Saharan Africa at CERFACS and the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse in 2006. Over the following 13 years, Cyril has worked across the Geography and Epidemiology departments at the University of Liverpool in the UK. He has worked on several multi-disciplinary research projects focusing on the impact of climate on invasive insect species and vector-borne diseases (malaria, Zika, dengue, Rift Valley Fever...) affecting human and animal health. His work has been cited by several intergovernmental agencies (IPCC, World Bank, UN…) and by mainstream media at global scale. He is now working at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to model the impact of sterile insect techniques on mosquito populations.
