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 Dermatologists should keep these changing patterns of skin diseases
in mind when making diagnoses, say the authors, who analyzed
specific disease shifts in North America.
As the planet warms, many bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites can
survive in areas where they haven’t been found before, the review
team writes.
In the U.S., for example, the incidence of the tick-borne Lyme
disease increased from an estimated 10,000 cases in 1995 to 30,000
in 2013, and the area where it occurs keeps expanding from New
England north into Canada as the ticks find their preferred habitat
expanding.
“In places like Canada, now there are ticks that carry Lyme disease
farther north than doctors would ever expect to see that,” Dr. Misha
Rosenbach of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia told
Reuters Health said in a phone interview.
The range of Valley Fever in the southwest U.S. is spreading in a
similar way, he said.
Viruses like dengue, chikungunya and Zika are transmitted by
mosquitoes originally from Africa and Asia, which have now spread
widely throughout North America as the mosquitoes can survive
further and further north.
“We are seeing a much wider spread northward for some of these
formerly tropical diseases that are now in Texas and Florida,”
Rosenbach said.
Seventeen of the warmest years on record occurred within the last 18
years, largely due to combustion of fossil fuels and destruction of
rainforests, the authors write in the Journal of the American
Academy of Dermatology.
Water warming and flooding can also give rise to skin threats not
previously typical of certain areas, the authors note. Ocean warming
increases jellyfish populations, and Portuguese man-of-war now swim
along the southeast U.S. coastline where they once did not, for
example.
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Parts of North America, particularly the Great Lakes, should expect
substantially greater rainfall and therefore more outbreaks of
waterborne disease as well.
Increasing temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico contribute to the
increased cases of illness from consuming raw oysters.
Another skin-related consequence of climate change is skin cancer:
as ozone is depleted, the risk of skin cancer goes up. A two-degree
temperature increase could raise skin cancer incidences by 10
percent each year, the authors write.
The dermatologic consequences of climate change may not all be
negative – you could argue that if temperatures keep rising, some
mosquito habitat will be dried out due to drought and some disease
ranges may shrink, Rosenbach said.
When doctors see patients with a fever and a rash, he added, "what
you suspect" as the diagnosis "depends on where you are.”
“It’s important to remember that what people learned 20 years ago or
10 years ago in medical school can be subject to rapid change,” he
said. “The bottom line is it’s important to keep an open mind about
possible diagnoses.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2enGiMA Journal of the American Academy of
Dermatology, online October 11, 2016.
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