date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 15:33:49 -0400 from: Paul Reiter subject: Climate change and mosquitoborne disease to: m.hulme@uea.ac.uk Dear Mike, Enjoyed meeting you last week. Attached are a couple of papers I mentioned. The review in Environmental Health Perspectives is the most comprehensive. As an example of the sort of thing I tried to explain to you, try the paper by Harvell in Science, June 21. I have never heard of any of the authors, yet they write with authority on dengue and malaria. I ran the bit on bird malaria past my Director, Duane Gubler. He worked on bird malaria in Hawaii in the 1960s. Even then it was a major cause of death in wild birds. He agreed: there is no reason to believe that climate change has been relevant in recent years. Then there is the bit in the Conclusions: The most detectable effects of directional climate warming on disease relate to geographic range expansion of pathogens such as Rift Valley fever, dengue ... I assure you, there is absolutely no evidence for either. RVF shows no change in range. Pandemics of dengue (and yellow fever) were once common in the USA and Europe. The first epidemic of dengue ever described was in Pennsylvania in 1780 (it was colder then!) and the disease occurred as far north as Boston. YF has been transmitted in Dublin and Swansea. Dengue has expanded in range since the 1950s-60s, when there was a major effort to eliminate the vector by DDT treatments. As the vector has returned, so has the virus. So, as I tried to explain, in my field there is a lamentable dissemination of unsubstantiated statements that are not supported by any observations. In answer to your questions re the IPCC: I dont make comments on the climatology, but if the statements are in any way of the same ilk as those in my field, then I think the situation is lamentable. Hope we get a chance to discuss some more. Best wishes Paul Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Reiter_clim_chge_mos_dis.PDF" Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Shakespeare.pdf" -- _________________________________ Paul Reiter CDC West Nile Project Harvard School of Public Health Building 1, Room 107 665 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 1 617 432 4228 Fax: 1 617 432 1796 Cell: 1 617 515 1494 _________________________________