title: The climate change-infectious disease nexus: is it time for climate change syndemics?
abstract: Conceptualizing climate as a distinct variable limits our understanding of the synergies and interactions between climate change and the range of abiotic and biotic factors, which influence animal health. Frameworks such as eco-epidemiology and the epi-systems approach, while more holistic, view climate and climate change as one of many discreet drivers of disease. Here, I argue for a new paradigmatic framework: climate-change syndemics. Climate-change syndemics begins from the assumption that climate change is one of many potential influences on infectious disease processes, but crucially is unlikely to act independently or in isolation; and as such, it is the inter-relationship between factors that take primacy in explorations of infectious disease and climate change. Equally importantly, as climate change will impact a wide range of diseases, the frame of analysis is at the collective rather than individual level (for both human and animal infectious disease) across populations.
authors.affiliation: Livestock Development Group, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AL, UK.
authors.forename: Claire
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Heffernan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D057231:Climate Change; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000662:veterinary*; D006801:Humans