Even before the 2015 Zika pandemic subsided, researchers recognized the links between a warming world and arboviruses shifting their ranges into new areas where human populations are susceptible to infection. UF medical geographer and EPI faculty member Sadie Ryan is the first author of a new study recently published in Global Change Biology that uses a temperature-dependent transmission model to show how Zika virus may expand globally to reach 1.33 billion new potential hosts in a scenario of unmitigated climate change. But if the effects of projected climate change are lessened through mitigation efforts to moderate emission scenarios, some 300 million of these people may be protected.
