Trinity scientists have discovered a new procedure to forecast how increasing temperatures will affect the severity of parasitic diseases. These methods may be used to better understand the impact of global warming on diseases such as malaria.
The method used to make the discovery can be applied extensively to different parasites in various temperatures. The discovery should help to analyse if the scale of the parasitic disease will increase or become more harmful as our planet grows warmer.
The method developed can be used to understand the impact of global warming on a variety of diseases, including diseases affecting aquaculture, such as diseases like Pancreas disease, Nosema and Lyme disease.
The discovery was made by Trinity scientists led by William C Campbell Lecturer in Parasite Biology in Trinity, Prof Pepijn Luijckx, and graduate student Devin Kirk from the University of Toronto.
In a press statement, Luijckx said: “Rising temperatures due to global warming can alter the proliferation and severity of infectious diseases, and this has broad implications for conservation and food security. It is therefore really important that we understand and identify the diseases that will become more harmful with rising temperatures, with a view to mitigating their impacts.”
It was a complex experiment, mainly because heat affects parasites in various ways. It is thus is hard to indicate the exact impact of warmer climates on parasites.
Luijckx said: “By using the metabolic theory of ecology we can estimate the thermal dependence of each individual process, step by step, and calculate a final prediction of disease severity at different, changing temperatures. We have been able to show that the method works very well in the model system we used.”
