Global warming may be behind increase in insects and disease-carrying animals

BY DELTHIA RICKS

Rising global temperatures may be helping to spark a population boom in insects and disease-carrying animals, creating unexpected threats to human populations, a number of scientific reports say.

Earlier this year a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that heat waves typified by stagnant masses of warm air that fails to cool at night will intensify throughout North America in the coming decades. A 2005 report by Harvard scientists carried similar findings.
With the arrival of summer, experts say special attention should be paid to ward against insects such as mosquitoes and ticks.

"There is no question that insects do better where it is warm," David Pimentel, a professor of entomology at Cornell University in Ithaca, said Friday.

West Nile disease, which appeared eight years ago in Queens, now has spread across the United States and Canada. Before 1999, it had not existed on the continent. Epidemiologists are uncertain exactly when -- and how -- West Nile, which is spread by birds that carry the virus, reached the United States. Mosquitoes that feed on fowl pick up the virus and transmit it to people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 23,975 people have been sickened by West Nile since it first appeared in the United States; 962 have died.

CDC scientists have noted that in 1999 only two subspecies of mosquitoes were carriers of the disease: Ades vexans and Culex pipiens. Now, entomologists have identified 62 subspecies of mosquitoes that carry the virus....

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