While diseases are caused by germs, that's also dependent on the weather. The wrong conditions can lead to disease outbreaks that wouldn't have happened otherwise. That's what happened in west and central Africa this year when heavy weather driven by global warming caused cholera to spread, CBC News reported.
What's happening?
Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger all experienced extreme weather in September, according to CBC News. Some areas flooded had a death toll of over 1,000 people, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes.
"The majority of the climate models that we looked at indicate a trend toward more extreme rainfall events in this region," Clair Barnes, a statistician with World Weather Attribution, told CBC News.
In the midst of the disaster, an outbreak of cholera — a waterborne disease — became much worse. It has killed more than 350 people in Nigeria this year, with 150 in the last month, per the World Health Organization. Sudan saw over 400 cholera deaths, CBC News reported.
Worse, this is likely to happen again. A WWA study predicted weather events like these could recur in Sudan roughly every three years, leaving the population little recovery time in between.
Why is this cholera outbreak important?
The saddening loss of life due to a preventable disease is reason enough to be concerned, and this situation bodes poorly for the future and for communities around the world.
Natural disasters like the recent floods are increasing in frequency and severity because of the world's rising temperature. The more polluted our air becomes, the more it traps heat on our planet, which not only warms the world up but also makes weather patterns less stable. Disasters — and the diseases that come with them — are already getting more common.
WWA's study showed that rain in the region is 5% to 20% worse because of global warming. "This is only going to keep getting worse if we keep burning fossil fuels," Barnes said in a press briefing, per CBC News.
Another outbreak of cholera already occurred in Malawi in 2022 and 2023 because of major storms. Other diseases are also seeing an increase. This is going to keep repeating and may threaten areas of the planet that don't normally experience these diseases.
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What's being done about cholera and other diseases?
International organizations have worked long and hard on creating and providing vaccines for these conditions. The more people can get vaccinated, the easier it will be to keep diseases from spreading.
"If we're going to see more outbreaks and those outbreaks are going to be larger, we need more vaccines to deploy," Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist from Toronto General Hospital, told CBC News.
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