Pathogen-specific Climatic Drivers and their Interactions with Landscape Processes Control Disease Transmission Patterns in Time and Space

Abstract:

Climate change is already having measurable effects on the transmission of infectious diseases, globally. Understanding which times and places will be most impacted going forwards is urgent for supporting disease control and management. However, so far, such questions have most often been addressed using empirical models, which may not be reliable for assessing conditions beyond historically-observed variability, and that usually only account for mean climate characteristics as drivers, with no consideration of how these may be mediated by on-the-ground environmental processes. Here, focusing on fasciolosis, a widespread emerging zoonotic water-related infection, as a case study, we investigate disease risk drivers including environmental properties and evaluate the impact of future potential changes on disease transmission and control across the UK, using a recently developed and tested mechanistic hydro-epidemiological model. Our results demonstrate in a process-based manner how landscape heterogeneity can alter climatic impacts on disease transmission, and that projected changes in disease seasonality and spread are linked with shifts in pathogen-specific climatic characteristics. By the end of the century, such changes are shown to reduce considerably the effectiveness of current treatment-based control practice across the UK, highlighting the need for more comprehensive strategies for risk reduction, rather than exclusively relying on drug treatment.