Healthy Ecosystems Are a Prerequisite for Human Health-A Call for Action in the Era of Climate Change with a Focus on Russia

One health in the Arctic - connections and actions

There is growing awareness and recognition of the importance of the One Health paradigm to address existing environmental threats and recognise emerging ones at an early stage among Arctic residents, public health agencies, and wildlife resource managers. The One Health approach, emphasising the interconnectedness of human, animal, and ecosystem health, plays a pivotal role in addressing these multifaceted issues. Warming climate and permafrost thaw may influence both contaminant exposure and the spread of zoonotic infectious diseases and have impacts on water and food security. Migration from rural regions to larger communities and urban centres along with increased tourism may be accompanied by changes in exposure to contaminants and zoonotic diseases. Universities have developed educational programmes and research projects on One Health in the Arctic, and under the Arctic Council there is running a project of One Arctic, One Health. These arctivities have produced interdisciplinary information and practical solutions for local communities, decision-makers, and in scientific forums. There is a need for epidemiological zoonotic/human disease models, as well as new approaches to integrate existing and future surveillance data to climatic and environmental data. This requires not only regional and international collaboration but also multi-agency and transdisciplinary research.

Research on Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic-A Bibliometric Review

One Health, a multidisciplinary approach to public health, which integrates human, animal, and environmental studies, is prudent for circumpolar Arctic health research. The objective of our bibliometric review was to identify and compare research in select infectious diseases in Arctic wildlife species with importance to human health indexed in English language databases (PubMed, Scopus) and the Russian database eLibrary.ru. Included articles (in English and Russian languages) needed to meet the following criteria: (1) data comes from the Arctic, (2) articles report original research or surveillance reports, (3) articles were published between 1990 and 2018, and (4) research relates to naturally occurring infections. Of the included articles (total n = 352), most were from Russia (n = 131, 37%), Norway (n = 58, 16%), Canada (n = 39, 11%), and Alaska (n = 39, 11%). Frequently reported infectious agents among selected mammals were Trichinella spp. (n = 39), Brucella spp. (n = 25), rabies virus (n = 11), Echinococcus spp. (n = 10), and Francisella tularensis (n = 9). There were 25 articles on anthrax in eLibrary.ru, while there were none in the other two databases. We identified future directions where opportunities for further research, collaboration, systematic reviews, or monitoring programs are possible and needed.

The impact of climatic factors on tick-related hospital visits and borreliosis incidence rates in European Russia

Tick-borne diseases are among the challenges associated with warming climate. Many studies predict, and already note, expansion of ticks’ habitats to the north, bringing previously non-endemic diseases, such as borreliosis and encephalitis, to the new areas. In addition, higher temperatures accelerate phases of ticks’ development in areas where ticks have established populations. Earlier works have shown that meteorological parameters, such as temperature and humidity influence ticks’ survival and define their areas of habitat. Here, we study the link between climatic parameters and tick-related hospital visits as well as borreliosis incidence rates focusing on European Russia. We have used yearly incidence rates of borreliosis spanning a period of 20 years (1997-2016) and weekly tick-related hospital visits spanning two years (2018-2019). We identify regions in Russia characterized by similar dynamics of incidence rates and dominating tick species. For each cluster, we find a set of climatic parameters that are significantly correlated with the incidence rates, though a linear regression approach using exclusively climatic parameters to incidence prediction was less than 50% effective. On a weekly timescale, we find correlations of different climatic parameters with hospital visits. Finally, we trained two long short-term memory neural network models to project the tick-related hospital visits until the end of the century, under the RCP8.5 climate scenario, and present our findings in the evolution of the tick season length for different regions in Russia. Our results show that the regions with an expected increase in both tick season length and borreliosis incidence rates are located in the southern forested areas of European Russia. Oppositely, our projections suggest no prolongation of the tick season length in the northern areas with already established tick population.