Forecasting climate's impact on a debilitating disease

In Brazil , climate and other human-made environmental changes threaten decades -long efforts to fight schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease.

Public health officials worry deforestation, rapid urban sprawl, and changing rainfall patterns could shift locations where the snails, and therefore the parasite, can thrive.

The models can then predict how changes in temperature, rainfall, and urbanization will affect the species' distributions in the future.

Stanford researcher looked at how accurate models predicted where snails might be given various changes in climate, hydrology, land use, and soil type.

Climate-induced changes -- especially in precipitation patterns -- have driven broad shifts in snails' range over the last 30 years .

Urbanization, meanwhile, has driven more localized changes, such as the emergence of new pockets of habitat suitable to snails in areas with significant population growth.

A multi-scale case study for schistosomiasis host snails in Brazil . PLOS Global Public Health , 2024 ; 4 ( 8) : e0002224 DOI: 10.1371 /journal.pgph.0002224 Cite This Page:.