Fellow Story
Levy on how warming climate could result in new infectious disease outbreaks
In developing countries, diarrhea, which is a symptom of gastrointestinal infection, is one of the biggest health concerns. Diarrhea kills 2.5 million children each year, but little data about diarrhea and climate exists. Karen Levy, an environmental epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, found that rotavirus, which causes diarrhea, becomes more active in tropical regions when the climate is cooler and drier. Levy will soon focus on predicting how other triggers of diarrhea - norovirus, a highly contagious bug and the leading cause of food-borne disease outbreaks in the United States, is her group's next target - will change with the climate.
