Planet Earth is feeling the heat of global warming. Researchers at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are investigating one side effect to climate change -- the spread of infectious diseases from animals to humans.
"We are seeing species that we have not seen before in areas that we have not seen before," said Dr. Bonnie Henry, director of public health emergency at B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
Dr. Henry says dengue fever, which is spread by mosquitoes, is now showing up in parts of South East Asia -- where it hasn't been a problem for 50 years.
"We are also seeing malaria re-emerge last year Jamaica and in the Caribbean where there haven't been malaria for quite some time, so these are very worrisome and could be related to global issues around climate change," she said.
In the last 100 years, B.C. has grown warmer by an average of one degree Celsius. It may not sound like much, but it's enough to affect the places where mosquitoes, ticks and other bacteria can live.
"We've been doing some modeling that if temperatures increase what is the potential for expansion of the habitat of the Ixodes tick that can carry Lyme disease and it's probably substantial," she said.
And local scientists are keeping an eye on Cryptococcus Gattii, a potentially deadly fungus which has spread from Vancouver Island to the Lower Mainland in the past two years.
"We are seeing outbreaks of Vibrio -- which is a bacteria that lives in the ocean in the last couple of years," said Dr. Henry.
This bacteria can infect shellfish causing food poisoning in people eating raw oysters.
Ultimately, climate change means increased vigilance for infectious diseases, food and water safety.
"We've been trying to set up a very robust surveillance system so that we can pick up these things early and hopefully get preventative messages out to people," she said.
