COVID-19 is just the beginning: Climate change is bringing a lot more diseases with it

“Tick-borne diseases are less straightforwardly climate-driven, as a lot of their ecology is mediated by landscape factors and their hosts,” Ryan told Salon, “but that is all on the move with climate change too, and is reflected in studies of climate and tick borne diseases.”

Whether we’re talking about ugly diseases like babesiosis and anaplasmosis or the most notorious tick-borne disease, Lyme disease, ticks are not going to hesitate to move as the climate gets warmer, and to carry their assorted pathogens with them. Ticks prefer air temperatures greater than 6°C but less than 7°C, a humidity rate is above 85%, and — like mosquitoes — to be in close proximity to large number of blood-delivering hosts. As an article from the scientific journal eLife explained at the time, this is part of a larger trend of pests flourishing as the Earth warms. “While climate adaptation has typically been studied in the context of conservation biology, population genetics theory suggests that evolutionary adaptation is most likely for short-lived species with high population growth rates — properties of many pest, pathogen, and vector species,” the authors explained.