Climate Change and Cholera: A Review Exploring the Association Between Storm Severity and Global Human Vibrio spp. Incidence.

Abstract

Current global meteorological evidence suggests that climate change is a direct contributor to the increased severity of weather events, such as hurricanes and typhoons, putting billions of people at increased risk of physical harm, property damage, and destructive flooding. When flood water becomes stagnant, communities are more susceptible to a multitude of infectious diseases, ranging from mosquito-borne parasites to bacterial infections. In the case of Vibrio spp., a bacterial pathogen class with an infamous history of waterborne illness, recent data has demonstrated the ability for salt water, fresh water, and brackish water replication, creating ideal conditions for spread after a tropical cyclone. Vibrio spp. infections, specifically species V. vulnificus, V. parahaemolyticus, and V. cholerae, have shown significant upticks in the number of global cases, with some species increasing in incidence by more than 8-fold in the last 40 years. These outbreaks are contained mainly in areas susceptible to large-scale storm events and primarily occur during or immediately following the conclusion of local storm seasons, suggesting a potential correlation between the presence of tropical weather events and increases in the number of human Vibrio infections. In this review, we present a compilation of sources from tropical cyclone-susceptible areas, including the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, containing evidence demonstrating that recent outbreaks of Vibrio spp. are correlated with an increase in the severity of storms. Many of the included studies used modeling to forecast future trends of vibriosis and, therefore, directly link the effects of climate change with detrimental impacts to human global health.