Climate change and infectious disease epidemics
In the last decades, the burden of infectious disease on human health has declined, but climate change is now undermining this progress. We may be in a new era of infectious diseases, when climate change increases the frequency and size of epidemics, and impairs public health containment efforts. Calls for action abound, and comprehensive threat assessments exist, some predating the COVID-19 pandemic. But to adapt to this warmer world, we should now turn calls for action into new public health policies that are based on quantitative understanding of the effect that climate change has on each specific disease, and epidemic.