Bite the birds

摘要

MOSQUITOES, which carry malaria parasites, like the warm and wet conditions that are expected to become more common with climate change. This has led many to reason that malarial infections will increase. Yet studies run into the unreliability of modelling future climatic effects and sometimes ignore changes in land use and health care. However, a new analysis of the spread of avian malaria shows that for the birds, at least, there is a real worry. Laszlo Garamszegi, of the Donana Biological Station in Spain, studied patterns of malarial infections in birds to avoid confounding human factors in determining the epidemiology of a closely related parasite. He looked at 43 previous studies that had carefully screened 3,000 bird species for malaria in different locations over the past 70 years. He found that an increase in global temperatures of 1℃ was accompanied by a twoto threefold increase in the average prevalence of malaria in birds. The most dramatic increases took place during the past 20 years.