A top mosquito expert has blasted Professor Dame Jenny Harries’s claim that climate change will make dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases common in the U.K. within 20 years, branding it “entirely fictional” and “shameless”.
Professor Harries, who heads the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA), recently said that rising temperatures will make such diseases common in the U.K. by 2040 because the Asian Tiger Mosquito – which can transmit dengue, chikungunya, zika, yellow fever and other viral diseases – will become established throughout Britain. Dengue will become endemic in London, she claimed.
But Professor Paul Reiter, retired Professor of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and a leading expert in mosquito-borne diseases, has ridiculed her claims. He told Net Zero Watch:
The natural range of the Tiger mosquito, an Asian species, extends from the tropics to regions where mean January temperatures are around –10°C. Northern strains are able to survive because in late summer, as days grow shorter, the eggs they lay are dormant and remain unhatched until spring arrives.
It is true that since the late 1970s, there has been rapid global spread of the Tiger mosquito to the United States, Latin America, Europe and across Africa, probably mainly via the global trade in used tyres. Professor Reiter says that it is beyond doubt that this has nothing at all to do with temperature.
Professor Reiter has also lambasted fearmongering about the return of malaria, noting that this was once a major cause of death in many parts of England, even during the Little Ice Age from the 1300s to the 1800s, and its disappearance was, once again, nothing to do with temperature:
Shakespeare mentions malaria – “the ague” – 13 times, so it was clearly once common here. The disease began to decline – for a multitude of reasons – in the mid-19th century, despite the upward trend in global temperatures.
Net Zero Watch Director Andrew Montford said:
This is not the first time we have seen the Civil Service misleading the public in this way. Science is being misused to generate fear and to ‘nudge’ us in a desired direction. This kind of shameful disinformation brings the Civil Service into disrepute.
But it seems our public officials won’t miss an opportunity to bang the climate alarmist drum as they attempt to cajole and coerce the public into accepting radical cuts in living standards to ward off threats based solely on the perennially wrong outputs of biased computer models.
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