Climate change prompts idea for new cyclone classification

Increasingly powerful cyclones driven by climate change may require a new classification for the storms, category 6.

Cyclone Winston which hit Fiji in 2016 had winds exceeding 230km/h which was the highest margin of a category 5 cyclone, Climate Change Minister James Shaw told Radio NZ.

The Pacific Climate Change Conference is underway in Wellington, attended by politicians, scientists and policymakers.

Read the story from The New Zealand Herald - “Climate change prompts idea for new cyclone classification.”

The changing disease climate

Virus and bacterial diseases don’t appear out of nowhere, and most require a host to stay active, reproduce and evolve. Insects and other animals play a key role in this - around 60 percent of infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – which means they’re spread from animals to humans.

Australia has never experienced a large outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

But this is a pattern also true of 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases.

Tracking disease prevalence, spread and movement among populations of animals is the role of veterinary epidemiologists like Dr Simon Firestone, Professor Mark Stevenson and Dr Anke Wiethoelter at the University of Melbourne.

“A nice analogy would be that a traditional veterinarian’s client is a single animal; a veterinary epidemiologist’s client is the country and all the farms and animals in that ecosystem,” Professor Stevenson says.

Read University of Melbourne Pursuit story - “The changing disease climate.”