Parasite zoonoses and climate change: molecular tools for tracking shifting boundaries.
For human, domestic animal and wildlife health, key effects of directional climate change include the risk of the altered occurrence of infectious diseases. Many parasite zoonoses have high potential for vulnerability to the new climate, in part because their free-living life-cycle stages and ectothermic hosts are directly exposed to climatic conditions. For these zoonoses, climate change can shift boundaries for ecosystem components and processes integral to parasite transmission and persistence, and these shifts can impact host health. Vulnerable boundaries include those for spatial distributions, host-parasite assemblages, demographic rates, life-cycle phenologies, associations within ecosystems, virulence, and patterns of infection and disease. This review describes these boundary shifts and how molecular techniques can be applied to defining the new boundaries.
Research Group for Arctic Parasitology, Western College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, 52 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5B4, Canada. lydden.polley@usask.ca
Lydden
L
Polley
R C Andrew
RC
Thompson
D000818:Animals; D017753:Ecosystem; D017752:Greenhouse Effect; D006790:Host-Parasite Interactions; D006801:Humans; D008967:Molecular Biology / Q000379:methods; D010271:Parasites / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics* / Q000254:growth & development; D010272:Parasitic Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000469:parasitology / Q000635:transmission; D015995:Prevalence; D015047:Zoonoses