Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Is environmental change contributing 2%, 20% or 200% more to infection rates? Does something else like the state of total unhealthiness in a major portion of the population completely dwarf this effect? Would this effect be completely moot if we weren't so massively networked across the globe?
As a standalone metric, it's completely void of meaning and potentially only newsworthy because it contains a politically hot topic (climate change)
Also that thing called 'valley fever' caused by some spores from fungi and blown by the wind.
Maybe even the plague, which still is endemic in some parts of the world.
Not that far away, actually. From the southwestern US down to Mexico f.e.
Also 'Zika'...
So micro organisms are buying natural selection lottery tickets both in bigger bulk as well as at higher frequency compared to macro organisms.
Normally thats not a problem, since both micro and macro organisms were effectively equilibrated to a long-term relatively stable niche, so it didn't matter that micro-organisms and macro-organisms converged to their respective optima at different rates, since they were already near optimum. That difference in convergence rate will become clear as the optimum shifts location.