Climate and Health
Climate and Health
As the climate continues to change, it is increasingly important to study its impacts on health. Climate can impact health through heat, drought, flooding, and other extreme weather events. However, it can also impact health through ecological exposures and our human interactions with the natural environment. One Health is a subfield of health research that recognizes the interconnections of human health to animals, plants, and our shared environment. One set of climate-driven environmental exposures are airborne fungal spores, which cause diseases like histoplasmosis and Valley Fever. As environmental conditions change and species habitats shift, the endemic regions for these fungal infections also evolve. However, there are many analytical and data challenges to studying the shifting endemic regions of airborne fungal infections. With funding from Los Alamos National Laboratory, we developed new approaches for characterizing the current endemic regions based on imperfect but available data.
Hepler SA, Kaufeld KA, Kline D, Greene A, Gorris ME. Estimating coccidioidomycosis endemicity while accounting for imperfect detection using spatio-temporal occupancy modeling. American Journal of Epidemiology. Published online July 16, 2024:kwae199. doi:10.1093/aje/kwae199
Hepler SA, Kaufeld KA, Benedict K, Toda M, Jackson BR, Liu X, Kline D. Integrating Public Health Surveillance and Environmental Data to Model Presence of Histoplasma in the United States. Epidemiology. 2022;33(5):654-659. doi:10.1097/EDE.0000000000001499