ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Scale-dependent climatic drivers of human epidemics in ancient China.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trends of infectious diseases, epidemic patterns, and the association with meteorological events: 2500 years of evidence from an observational study.Journal of global health · 2025Observational
- Extreme Drought Events (1585-1590) and Spatiotemporal Patterns of Infectious Diseases Outbreaks in Ming Dynasty China.GeoHealth · 2025Article
- Temporal and Spatial Effects of Extreme Drought Events on Human Epidemics over Ancient China in 1784-1787 CE.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2025Article
- A long-term study on the impact of climatic variables on two common nest-dwelling ectoparasites of the Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus).Integrative zoology · 2025Article
- Long-term decrease in Asian monsoon rainfall and abrupt climate change events over the past 6,700 years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The role of weather conditions in COVID-19 transmission: A study of a global panel of 1236 regions.Journal of cleaner production · 2021Article
- Climate change affected the spatio-temporal occurrence of disasters in China over the past five centuries.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Historical records reveal the distinctive associations of human disturbance and extreme climate change with local extinction of mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Historical reconstruction unveils the risk of mass mortality and ecosystem collapse during pancontinental megadrought.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Modeling Future Projections of Temperature-Related Excess Morbidity due to Infectious Gastroenteritis under Climate Change Conditions in Japan.Environmental health perspectives · 2019Article
- Differential effects of global and local climate data in assessing environmental drivers of epidemic outbreaks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Climate and society in long-term perspective: Opportunities and pitfalls in the use of historical datasets.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Climate changeReview
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Abstract
A wide range of climate change-induced effects have been implicated in the prevalence of infectious diseases. Disentangling causes and consequences, however, remains particularly challenging at historical time scales, for which the quality and quantity of most of the available natural proxy archives and written documentary sources often decline. Here, we reconstruct the spatiotemporal occurrence patterns of human epidemics for large parts of China and most of the last two millennia. Cold and dry climate conditions indirectly increased the prevalence of epidemics through the influences of locusts and famines. Our results further reveal that low-frequency, long-term temperature trends mainly contributed to negative associations with epidemics, while positive associations of epidemics with droughts, floods, locusts, and famines mainly coincided with both higher and lower frequency temperature variations. Nevertheless, unstable relationships between human epidemics and temperature changes were observed on relatively smaller time scales. Our study suggests that an intertwined, direct, and indirect array of biological, ecological, and societal responses to different aspects of past climatic changes strongly depended on the frequency domain and study period chosen.
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