Italy, France, and Other Tropical Countries

The NYT has a story on the advance of tropical disease into new environments, with an assist from global warming and globalization: As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy .

CASTIGLIONE DI CERVIA, Italy — Panic was spreading this August through this tidy village of 2,000 as one person after another fell ill with weeks of high fever, exhaustion and excruciating bone pain, just as most of Italy was enjoying Ferragosto, its most important summer holiday.

Officials set out insect traps and were surprised by what they caught: tiger mosquitoes.
“At one point, I simply couldn’t stand up to get out of the car,” said Antonio Ciano, 62, an elegant retiree in a pashmina scarf and trendy blue glasses. “I fell. I thought, O.K., my time is up. I’m going to die. It was really that dramatic.”

. . .

After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.

Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.

This and similar events are a predictable and long predicted consequence of climate change. Mosquitos can't fly all the way from India to Italy, of course, so global commerce plays its role as well.

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