Changing Planet: Infectious Diseases

Climate change is having a major impact on many infectious diseases. In some cases, warmer and wetter weather is allowing vectors (the insect or animal that spreads a disease) to grow more easily and spread the disease more freely. In other cases, climate change is causing increasingly frequent catastrophic weather events like storms or flooding, and these events drive people from safe living conditions to conditions where diseases like cholera can quickly become a problem. Many of these diseases are difficult to treat or prevent medically, so it is important that we understand how they might be affected by climate change so we can predict and prepare for them.

Click on the video to watch the NBC Learn video - Changing Planet: Infectious Diseases.

Lesson plan: Changing Planet: Infectious Diseases

Last modified April 20, 2011 by Jennifer Bergman.

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