Environmental changes and emerging vector-borne diseases: A review

ABSTRACT: Vector-borne infectious diseases are resurging as a result of changes in public health policy, demographic and societal changes, insecticide and drug resistance, shift in emphasis from prevention to emergency response, genetic changes in pathogens in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Each environmental change, whether occurring as a natural phenomenon or through human intervention, changes the ecological balance and context within which disease hosts or vectors and parasites breed, develop, and transmit disease. Climate changes also can influence the emergence and reemergence of these diseases which are malaria, dengue, yellow fever, plague, filariasis, louse-borne typhus, Lyme disease, trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis and viral diseases. West Nile virus is just the latest example of this type of invasion by exotic virus. This paper provides an overview of the distribution, reasons of emergence or reemergence of the important vector-borne diseases throughout the world