As the world's temperature rises there will be more and more disease. When the world gets warmer mosquitoes and vermin will bring diseases to more and more places. Mosquito-borne malaria is generally restricted to humid regions with an average temperature of 61 degrees. Now about 45 percent of the world has an average temperature of 61 degrees. Global warming in the range of 6 to 10 degrees would spread the disease to 60 percent of the world.

The consequences are supposed to be more devastating for less developed nations and the tropics. Today many people in the tropical highlands are protected by their higher elevations and cooler weather. In 1987 Rwanda had a two percent increase in temperature and that led to a 337 percent increase in malaria rates. Today malaria kills two million people a year. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, by the middle of the next century global warming could cause and additional million malaria deaths every year.

Climate change is also increasing the range of Aedes aegypti, the species of mosquito that carries both dengue and yellow fever. A hot summer in 1995 led to 140,000 cases of dengue fever from Argentina to Texas. Dengue fever is a disease that causes fever, head and eye aches, and pain in the muscles and joints. Symptoms of the disease appear three to six days after the disease-bearing mosquito bites the victim. Dengue is found throughout the tropics and sub-tropics.

The weather extremes caused by global warming could lead to outbreaks of deadly hantavirus, the acute, often fatal respiratory illness that recently killed 76 people nationwide.

Another deadly threat is the resurgence of cholera which thrives in the higher water temperatures of a warmer world. It has already been found in the Chesapeake Bay. A 1991 cholera epidemic in South America killed 5,000 people.

Willie Paul Fitka