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The brilliant @rebaker64 from @PrincetonEnviro works at the nexus of two challenges: climate change and infectious disease. We chatted (audio here): https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/t/1_vo4oz5jp
Unpicking how climate variation (temperature, humidity, rainfall) drives peaks and troughs of infectious diseases is tricky. So many things are seasonal, so everything goes up and down at once. So how can we know what causes what? Working with @ayesha_s_m...
... @rebaker64 came up with a mechanistically rooted statistical way to address this with chicken-pox data, using simulations to ground results: http://tigress-web.princeton.edu/~wenchang/pub/climate_and_disease/papers/Baker_2018.pdf
Then @rebaker64 and @ayesha_s_m used these methods to establish seasonal drivers of RSV, a leading pulmonary cause of death in the under fives, and projected this through future climate scenarios, with help from @wy2136 from Geosciences: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13562-y
A lynchpin is accounting for susceptible individuals. Even if the climate is perfect for transmission, an infection cannot spread if no one is susceptible. Depletion of susceptibles alongside changes in seasonal drivers (climate, human behavior...) drives (multi-) annual cycles.
In spring 2020, some suggested that climate drivers would 'make the virus go away in the summer'. This neglected the fact that just about everyone in the world was still susceptible. @rebaker64 showed this huge mass of susceptibility made this unlikely: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6501/315
Declines in cases of SARS-CoV-2 to date are likely mostly driven by physical distancing. This hasn't just reduced spread of SARS-CoV-2. Other infections ( flu and RSV) have also declined as @rebaker64 and @sang_woo_park showed: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/48/30547
An important thing to keep in mind here is that this also allows build-up of susceptibles to these infections - so potentially laying the ground for larger outbreaks of e.g., RSV in the future
Looking beyond infectious diseases, @rebaker64 has also worked on malnourishment ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74942-9)
and considered implications of climate change for vaccine-preventable infections, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40572-020-00293-2, and more.
