As climate change intensifies, drought is widening globally, causing alterations in water-dependent pathogen patterns, leaving scientists scrambling to understand how infectious disease transmission is evolving. They’ll need to act quickly to predict and prepare for future outbreaks: In 2025, annual drought affected approximately 30% of the globe’s land surface, a near doubling of area since 2000. Currently, one child dies every 90 seconds from a waterborne disease. Many species of microorganisms are known to infect humans via waterborne illnesses or via hosts like mosquitoes that need water to reproduce. So, it was long thought that when drought shrank or dried up water sources, infectious disease would decrease. Scientists now know this isn’t true, and a recent paper sheds light on the ecological processes defining this drought-disease paradox. “When people think about drought, they think about water shortage, wildfire, loss of agriculture, et cetera,” study co-author Pieter Johnson, a disease ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder in the U.S. told Mongabay in a phone interview. “But drought is also influencing how plants and animals interact, including how they interact with parasites,” and also which among those pathogens might be winners or losers as drought spreads. A typical river during drought: As a waterbody shrinks, proximity of animals and microorganisms is increased, aiding the transmission of infectious disease — an effect defined by the drought-disease paradox. Image by Arushdeep Singh via Unsplash. The review paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution examined 100 previous studies focusing solely on…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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