Rude Awakening

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https://www.science.org/content/article/how-rains-pigs-and-waterbirds-fueled-shocking-disease-outbreak-australia

By MEREDITH WADMAN, Science. 

Excerpt: The appearance of a “tropical” mosquito-borne illness in southeastern Australia has unsettled researchers. ...McCann was the fourth patient in as many weeks admitted to Albury with encephalitis. Like McCann, the three others had turned up feverish and confused. ...among the possible causes were mosquito-borne viruses, in particular two encephalitis-causing viruses endemic to Australia: Kunjin, a strain of West Nile virus, and Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVEV), named for the river valley where McCann has swum, water skied, fished, and boated since he was a boy. ...As with other weather events, the record-breaking wetness of the 2021–22 season can’t be attributed with certainty to climate change. But as the globe warms, the atmosphere holds more water, enabling more intense rainfall and flooding; daily rainfall associated with thunderstorms increased between 13% and 24% in Australia between 1979 and 2016. ...“El Niño and La Niña cycles are natural, but they are more extreme than they have ever been before,” says Eloise Skinner, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and Griffith University. Those extremes can create and remove water sources, changing the distribution of species, including those that bear disease, she says. “As someone that looks at animals, diseases, and movement, I think climate change is critically important.”...

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