CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The planet's climate has experienced significant variationsover the past 150 years as evidenced in temperature changes that have led to awarmer global climate, altered rainfall patterns and a higher frequency ofextreme events. Global climate change affects the functioning of manyecosystems and the species inhabiting them. Additionally, it has an impacts onhuman health being able to change the frequency of infectious diseases andepidemic outbreaks.Nonetheless, epidemiological studies have indicateddifficulties in estimating the role that climate plays in health changes. Mostof the literature lacks concrete evidence of climate impact on vector-bornediseases. Therefore, this work aims to perform a literature review in order to:a) determine the diseases associated with climate change that have beenextensively reviewed in South America, b) determine how climate affects thesediseases and their vectors or reservoirs, and c) analyze the distribution andabundance of publications related to Health and Climate Variability and ClimateChange in South America.In this framework, a systematic review of theliterature published was conducted, identifying, evaluating and summarizingscientific papers available in Scielo, Pubmed and Lilacs databases. Searches inthese electronic databases were conducted using keywords either in Spanish orEnglish. The most important climate-sensitive vector-borne-diseases in SouthAmerica, according to Githeko et al.(2000), as far as the number of individuals affected are concerned, were considered,i.e., leishmaniasis, dengue fever, chagas disease and schistosomiasis. Leptospirosiswas also included due to its strong presence in a large number of publications aswell as its relationship with rainfall, becoming one of the most sensitive diseasesto variability and climate change. Literature search was performed including thesediseases combined with other terms, such as: temperature/ rainfall/ rainfall/humidity/ river/ summer/ winter/ meteorological variables/ climate factors/climate change/ El Niño/Aedes. The same combination of descriptors was used forthe other diseases.A database including the publications and thefollowing information was built: authors and publication year, journal name, publicationtitle, period of study, study area, study design, statistical analysis methods,objectives and main outcomes. The diseases, together with their relationshipwith climate variables, were presented in tables and weighed based on thenumber of research works that had studied them. The distribution of the studyarea and disease types of the publications were represented on maps. The maps displaystudy density by geographic region, and were built using raster layers with QGISand TerrSet software. Each layer represents a publication, therefore,overlapping layers/publications resulted in a gradient showing a greater orlesser number of publications per disease in different regions.

enviar mensaje