The warm weather phenomenon El Niño may be the root of the transportation and spread of waterborne diseases like cholera, effectively bringing them thousands of miles across the ocean and having grave implications for public health. A study was conducted at the University of Bath that explores the connection between the arrival of dangerous new diseases in Latin American and the timeline of El Niño.
El Niño occurs every three to seven years and results in the unusual warming of surface waters along the tropical west coast of South America. However, in the recent years it has become more severe and many point to climate change as the culprit.
The team collaborated with the National Institute of Health (INS) in order to reveal that illnesses stemming from waterborne bacteria in Latin America are occurring in coordination with where and when El Niño waters are coming into contact with the land.
Using data derived from the whole-genome sequencing of bacterial strains, the team made links between the organisms that are causing illnesses in Asia and those emerging the Latin America.
Over the last 30 years, new genetic waterborne pathogen variants have been making their way into Latin America, all coinciding with the last three significant El Niño events. In particular, the cholera outbreak in Peru in 1990, and the two widespread contaminations of new variants of the Vibrio parahaemolyticus in 1997 and 2010.
"Through our findings we suggest that so-called vibrios - microscopic bacteria commonly found in seawater - can attach to larger organisms such as zooplankton to travel oceans," Jaime Martinez-Urtaza, lead author of the study, said in a press release. "Numerous previous studies have shown how such vibrios bind to and use these larger organisms as a source of energy and through this mechanism, we suggest, they are essentially able to piggyback to travel such enormous diseases, driven by ocean currents."
"The effects of El Niño events and their impacts on local weather, fisheries and the risk of more extreme meteorological events are already well-documented," he concluded. "Now understanding the role the ocean currents are also playing in transporting these disease has huge significance for public health campaigns in those countries."
The findings were published in Nature Microbiology.
