Stockholm Paradigm: Climate Change and Emerging Disease

The Stockholm Paradigm explains the emergence of infectious diseases as a result of the evolution of pathogen-host systems, catalyzed by climate change. It suggests that the planet is a minefield of pathogens, and climate change provides new opportunities for contact. We are unprepared for the threat, but the Stockholm Paradigm offers hope for managing the crisis through the DAMA protocol.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 400 pages
Publication date: 19 July 2019
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

The current crisis of emerging diseases has been a century and a half in the making, with human, veterinary, and crop health practitioners believing that disease could be controlled through medicating the sick, vaccinating those at risk, and eradicating the parts of the biosphere responsible for disease transmission. Evolutionary biologists believed that coevolution between pathogens and hosts provided a firewall against disease emergence in new hosts. Most climate scientists made no connection between climate changes and disease.

As this book reveals, a new understanding of the evolution of pathogen-host systems, called the Stockholm Paradigm, explains what is happening. The planet is a minefield of pathogens with preexisting capacities to infect susceptible but unexposed hosts, needing only the opportunity for contact. Climate change has always been the major catalyst for such new opportunities, as it disrupts local ecosystem structure and allows pathogens and hosts to move. Once pathogens expand to new hosts, novel variants may emerge, each with new infection capacities.

Mathematical models and real-world examples uniformly support these ideas. Emerging disease is thus one of the greatest climate change-related threats confronting humanity. While time is short, the danger is great, and we are largely unprepared.

The Stockholm Paradigm offers hope for managing the crisis. By using the DAMA (document, assess, monitor, act) protocol, we can anticipate mitigating emerging diseases, buying time and saving money while we search for more effective ways to cope with this challenge.

Weight: 556g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226632445