WWF Climate Change
Campaign
Director Adam Markham
c/o World Wildlife Fund-US
1250 Twenty-fourth St., NW
Washington, DC 20037
Tel: (202) 861-8388
Fax: (202) 331-2391
E-mail: climate@wwf.org
Visit our website at :
http://www.panda.org
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here will also be changes in the availability of the preferred habitat of disease-carrying species (notably mosquitoes, tsetse flies, and ticks). Ninety percent of the world's malaria cases currently occur in Africa. An analysis by Dr. David Rogers of Oxford University, suggests that the distribution of malaria-bearing Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes is likely to increase under all three scenarios. Climate change threatens to exacerbate the region's existing problem, extending the A. gambiae range southward and westward into areas of Namibia and northern South Africa where human populations have little immunity to the disease. According to the IPCC, high-lying, malaria-free cities such as Harare and Nairobi could also risk being invaded by malaria-bearing mosquitoes. There have already been reports of malaria extending to higher altitudes in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania as a result of the warming of night-time temperatures.
Dr. Rogers' analysis also points to distributional changes for tsetse flies (which carry sleeping sickness and the cattle disease, nagana), and the tick-borne livestock disease called East coast fever, or corridor disease. As with many of the impacts of climate change on southern Africa, preparing for change will be a key to successful adaptation. It has been suggested that "sentinel diagnostic centers" could be established in sensitive geographic regions of Africa bordering endemic zones, to provide early warning of changes in infectious diseases.
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