In Brazil, climate and other human-made environmental changes threaten decades-long efforts to fight a widespread and debilitating parasitic disease. Now, a partnership between researchers from Stanford and Brazil is helping to proactively predict these impacts.
Schistosomiasis, spread by freshwater snails, affects more than 200 million people in many tropical regions of the world. It can cause stomach pain and irreversible consequences such as enlarged liver and cancer. Public health officials worry that deforestation, rapid urban sprawl, and changing rainfall patterns - such as Brazil's devastating May floods - could dramatically shift the locations where the snails, and therefore the parasite, can thrive.
"With climate change, more frequent and intense rains will impact many diseases here, including schistosomiasis," said Roseli Tuan, a senior researcher at the São Paulo Secretariat of Health, where she has conducted schistosomiasis surveillance and research in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, for more than 30 years. "Understanding these changes is a necessary area of science for the control of the disease in the future."
Tuan and her Brazilian colleagues have been partnering with Stanford disease ecology researchers to develop models that can predict how the disease risk will shift in response to environmental changes. Their findings were recently published in Nature Communications and PLOS Global Public Health.
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An aerial image of a field site in Brazil where researchers are studying the habitats suitable to the snails that transmit schistosomiasis, a debilitating neglected tropical disease. | Andrew Chamberlin, De Leo Lab
