Author: Shagun Snigdha Das

Climate change is making livestock susceptible to diseases; here is how

Source(s): Down To Earth

There is also growing evidence that changes in rainfall pattern, frequent floods and droughts and intense heatwaves have substantial effects on transmission patterns of infectious diseases.

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There is also growing evidence that changes in rainfall pattern, frequent floods and droughts and intense heatwaves in a warming world have substantial effects on transmission patterns of infectious diseases.

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The existing knowledge suggests that climate change impacts livestock diseases in two broad ways. One, directly because of heat stress, and two, indirectly, because of extreme weather events and their impact on disease-causing pathogens and vectors. 

All animals have a thermal comfort zone which is beneficial to their physiological functions.

When the ambient environmental temperature exceeds the upper critical threshold, it leads to heat stress, metabolic disorder and immune suppression among the livestock, “resulting in an increased propensity for disease incidence and death,” write researchers with the Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute in Dhaka, an autonomous government research centre, in Open Veterinary Journal in May 2020.

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A rise in temperature, precipitation intensity, flooding and humidity can also increase pathogens’ or vectors’ metabolic processes, reproductive rates, resulting in enhanced vector–pathogen–host contact and, therefore, the risk of disease.

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