Rising flood risks threaten many water and sewage treatment plants across the US
Suman Naishadham, Brittany Peterson and Camille Fassett – August 10, 2023
A sewer pipe is exposed due to eroded land at the wastewater treatment plant following July flooding, Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023, in Ludlow, Vt. Across the U.S., municipal water systems and sewage treatment plants are at increasing risk of damage from floods and sea-level rise brought on in part or even wholly by climate change. The storm that wallopedA sewer pipe is exposed due to eroded land at the wastewater treatment plant following July flooding, Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023, in Ludlow, Vt. Across the U.S., municipal water systems and sewage treatment plants are at increasing risk of damage from floods and sea-level rise brought on in part or even wholly by climate change. The storm that
LUDLOW, Vermont (AP) — The crack of a summer thunderstorm once comforted people in Ludlow, Vermont. But that was before a storm dropped eight inches of rain on the village of 2,200 in two days last month. And it was before the devastation of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. Now a coming rainstorm can stir panic.
“We could lose everything again,” said Brendan McNamara, Ludlow’s municipal manager.
The rainfall that walloped Vermont last month hit Ludlow so hard that floodwaters carried away cars and wiped out roads. It sent mud and debris into homes and businesses and forced officials to close a main road for days.
Thankfully, the facility that keeps the village’s drinking water safe was built at elevation and survived. But its sewage plant fared less well. Flooding tore through it, uprooting chunks of road, damaging buildings and sweeping sewage from treatment tanks into the river. Even now the plant can only handle half its normal load.
It’s not just Ludlow. Water infrastructure across the country is vulnerable as climate change makes storms more unpredictable and destructive, flooding low-lying drinking water treatment plants and overwhelming coastal sewage systems.
“Wastewater systems are not designed for this changing climate,” said Sri Vedachalam, director for water equity and climate resilience at Corvius Infrastructure Solutions LLC. “They were designed for an older climate that probably doesn’t exist anymore.”
A big reason is geography. Wastewater systems — which deal with sewage or stormwater runoff — are often near water bodies because that is where they discharge. But this makes them vulnerable.
Wastewater systems typically are at the lowest point in the community,” Vedachalam said, noting they often flow by gravity. “In many cases, if you have a really large storm, those are the ones that do get flooded first.”
When storms drop inches of rain onto lakes and rivers over a short period of time, water and debris can clog wastewater systems, power can be knocked out, and service disrupted.
Government flood maps are not up to date; they don’t reflect the risk of flooding in a changing climate. So the risk analysis firm First Street Foundation took a respected climate model and applied it to 5,500 wastewater treatment plants. Then it looked at the possibility of those flooding today and 30 years from now.
The Associated Press then determined the 25% of plants most at risk currently, and where the situation will worsen the most over time, mapping both.
Some metro areas have an especially large proportion of sewage treatment centers at risk if a mega flood occurred today, AP found. They include: South Bend-Elkhart-Mishawaka, bridging Indiana and Michigan; Charleston-Huntington-Ashland, bridging West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky; Madison-Janesville-Beloit in Wisconsin and Syracuse-Auburn, New York.
Drinking water treatment plants are also at risk. Most U.S. cities and towns get drinking water from rivers and lakes, and water treatment plants tend to be near the water bodies from which they draw.
“Simply by having water purification plants close to where we are getting the water from, that water source is affected by climate change,” said Darren Olson, a Chicago-based water resources engineer and member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The fact that the nation’s water pipes are aging adds to the risk. The engineering society estimates that a water main breaks in the U.S. every two minutes, leading to six billion gallons of lost water each day, or enough to fill 9,000 swimming pools.
Recent federal spending packages commit billions of dollars to upgrading the nation’s water systems, but the roughly $55 billion for upgrades in the Biden administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure law represent a fraction of what’s needed to address climate-related risks to water and sewage systems. Part of the reason is that other problems — such as lead pipes — need urgent attention. Often, they have little to do with a changing climate, said Olson.
And while larger cities such as Boston and Chicago can fund new projects in part by raising rates on customers, smaller cities and towns have to find other funding sources — often through state or federal grants — to avoid driving up bills, according to Adam Carpenter, manager of energy and environmental policy at the American Water Works Association.
“Wastewater treatment facilities are not cheap,” said Vedachalam. The hundreds of millions of dollars needed to rebuilt one, he said, can equal several times a town’s annual budget.
When Tropical Storm Irene battered Vermont twelve years ago, it cut off power — including to Ludlow’s wastewater plant. Officials rebuilt it according to stricter guidelines from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Joe Gaudiana, the village’s chief water and sewer operator.
They put the plant’s backup generator up on a block of concrete the height of a professional basketball player.
But July’s deluge knocked the whole block askew and wiped out the generator’s controls, rendering it useless. Municipal manager McNamara still isn’t sure how that much concrete got moved, or what Ludlow will do next.
“In a town such as ours, sometimes your options are limited because of geography, because of the terrain,” McNamara said.
Gaudiana would like the town to build a V-shaped wall to steer floodwaters away from the critical place where he works protecting people and the river from raw sewage. He called it “simple insurance that would definitely prevent all this.”
“Unless the wall failed,” he added.
Naishadham reported from Washington, D.C. Fassett reported from Seattle.
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Bone dry on the range: Texas cattle ranchers battle drought, extreme heat
Evan Garcia – August 10, 2023
Cattle move throughout a pasture during a heat wave in Tennessee ColonyRancher David Henderson watches his herd of cattle after pouring them animal feed on his ranch in Tennessee ColonyCattle gather in the shade during a heat wave in Tennessee Colony
TENNESSEE COLONY, Texas (Reuters) – The brown and black cattle of Texas, beloved symbols of the Lone Star state, walk through desiccated grass and stand in shrunken watering holes while their ranchers struggle to get them enough food.
For the second summer in a row, drought and extreme heat are stressing the health of cattle in Texas – the top beef-producing state in the U.S. by far – leading some ranchers to think about thinning their herds to save money on animal feed and hay.
“The grass is just not growing and primarily because it’s thirsty,” said rancher David Henderson. “Now we hit August and this is normally our hottest, driest time of the year … and the only thing I can think of, sometimes it calls for selling cows.”Henderson, 62, manages a herd of about 150 cows in Tennessee Colony in East Texas, and said he sold roughly 30 cows in 2022 due to the drought.
Dry conditions last year drove ranchers in East Texas to sell more than 2.66 million cattle from January 2022 through August 2022 — an increase of more than 480,000 cattle compared to that time period the previous year, according to the Texas Farm Bureau.
Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon predicts extreme heat spurred by global warming will become the norm.
“Well, certainly for the next few decades, the trends are going to continue,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “This sort of heat will become normal in the summertime for Texas. And that, in addition, means that the heat extremes will be that much hotter and that much more severe.”
The drought, triple-digit heat and lack of food impacts just about every facet of the cattle industry – how much milk the calves get, how the cows fatten up, how much they reproduce, and how much that coveted steak will cost.
Jimmy Reed owns the Cattle Ranch Supply store in Tennessee Colony and, with pastures diminished, has been sending out feed deliveries to ranchers in early August instead of the normal time in mid-November.
“With everybody wanting to eat that rib eye and that T-Bone or those ribs, there’s going to be less supply. So the price of beef will once again take a rise,” Reed said.
Rancher Corey Davis, 39, said after plentiful spring rains he had been optimistic.
“This year, I thought being a young farmer, I said, ‘Well, we’re going to make a bunch of hay,'” Davis said.
“I was excited and you know, four or five months later, no rain for a month. So, we’re back in a drought again.”
(Reporting by Evan Garcia; Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Julia Jacobo – August 10, 2023
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Life as we know it could soon change if extreme, dangerous heat continues to inundate regions for longer stretches of time and at higher temperatures, according to experts.
A large part of the U.S., including much of the southern portion stretching from the West Coast, across Texas and to the Southeast, has been experiencing triple-digit temperatures and heat indexes for weeks on end.
Record-breaking temperatures have been the norm in several cities in recent weeks, including Phoenix, which has now seen more than 40 consecutive days at about 110 degrees.
Hotter-than-ever temperatures, and longer periods of time when they occur, will become the norm unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically curbed, mitigating further global warming, according to climate scientists. Americans could see an average of 53 more days of extreme heat by 2050, if emissions aren’t reduced, according to climate modeling data released by the ICF Climate Center in June.
The increased heat is guaranteed to alter how society operates, experts told ABC News.
Summer is synonymous with time spent outdoors for school-aged children all over the world.
But parents may be cautious about letting their kids spend prolonged periods of time outdoors when temperatures are nearing triple digits, especially if air quality is poor or UV indexes high, experts told ABC News.
“The great outdoors go from being a magical place of exploration to a threatening place, full of fear,” Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected the psychological health of young people, told ABC News.
PHOTO: A World Youth Day volunteer uses a small fan to cool off from the intense heat, just outside Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 6, 2023. (Armando Franca/AP)
Less time outdoors could also be detrimental for children’s development. Research shows outdoor time is linked with improved motor development and lower obesity rates and nearsightedness in children. Outdoor play also promotes curiosity, creativity and critical thinking and is linked with behavior displaying less anger and aggression, studies have shown.
Few things could be more injurious to a child’s development than to be cooped up inside year-round, Van Susteren said, adding that humans have evolved to find the sounds and sights of nature meaningful and necessary for a healthy outlook.
“Yeah, you could always build something artificial. But don’t expect it to do for us mentally, which includes our ability to empathize and be generous, and to feel a sense of adventure,” she said.
Evidence that being holed up indoors is detrimental to kids’ mental health surmounted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added more to the preexisting psychological distress among young people, according to the U.S. Surgeon General.
Athletes of all ages and levels will likely need to alter their training to stay safe during extreme heat, but those training for intense competitions that take place in a scorching climate need to be especially careful, said Brian Maiorano, coach liason for Core, a wearable tech that allows athletes to measure their core body temperature on the go.
Those training for competitions and races will need to adapt to the higher temperatures in order to participate safely, said Maiorano, who has coached athletes for running competitions and triathlons for 15 years.
“The human body is extremely adaptable, if given the right training,” he said.
Rather than training indoors in a climate-controlled setting, athletes will need to train outside and get their core body temperature to a level that will cause physiological adaptions, Maiorano said. Otherwise, athletes will suffer on race day.
Temperatures in the 90s are considered extreme for endurance athletes, while temperatures in the 80s would be considered extreme for those training for an event with even more difficulty and physical exertion, like the Ironman Triathlon, Maiorano said. About 80% of the heat in the body is generated by the power in the muscles, he said.
“It’s like literally having a space heater inside of you,” he said.
PHOTO: Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews gets relief from the heat next to a water mister during the team’s NFL football training camp, July 29, 2023, in Baltimore. (Nick Wass/AP)
Up until a few years ago, heat training was an “imprecise practice,” Maiorano said.
People training for events in warm climates — like the Hawaii Ironman and the Western States Endurance Run, which is a 100-mile race through the desert in California — were likely told by their coaches to go out during the hottest part of the day while wearing multiple layers of clothes.
“Cook yourself, but don’t overcook yourself, which is some really vague guidance,” Maiorano said. “It’s guidance you can give to a top athlete and hope that they don’t cause themselves heatstroke, but it’s not something that you can tell an age group athlete to do.”
Extreme heat will affect travel decisions people make in the summer, the peak travel season while kids are out of school, Erika Richter, spokesperson for the American Society of Travel Advisers, told ABC News.
“The climate crisis will impact where we go, when we go, and, in some cases, if we go,” Richter said.
The travel industry is already seeing shifts for travel to Greece, France and Spain, Richter said. While the peak tourist season is typically around July, Europe has been reaching record temperatures in recent years during that time. Combined with wildfires, the climate is causing people to travel to those destinations in the spring or early summer instead, Richter said.
People are also starting to choose cooler places for the summer travel season, such as Northern Europe, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Richter said.
PHOTO: Tourists refresh with water near the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis hill during a heat wave on July 20, 2023 in Athens, Greece. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
Extreme heat is also heavily affecting air travel.
It is difficult for planes to take off in hot temperatures because as the air warms, it expands, so the number of molecules available to push the plane up is reduced. In June, Richter experienced a six-hour delay on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Portland because the plane could not take off with the number of passengers, she said.
While some passengers took the $1,000 credit offered to give up their seat, the originally nonstop flight had to stop in Missouri to refuel, because the plane could not handle the fuel load needed for the transcontinental flight, Richter said.
Extreme heat can also increase the amount of turbulence passengers experience. A 2017 study found that climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080. Clear-air turbulence, which occurs without a visual warning like clouds or thunderstorms and is usually at high altitudes, is currently on the rise worldwide and at varying altitudes, the study found.
There have been several reports of heavy turbulence this summer, including a Hawaiian airlines flight in July that injured several flight attendants and passengers.
The wildfires in Canada, which have been so severe this season in part due to higher temperatures and drought, have impacted travel in the U.S., Richter said.
With more heat and humidity comes the possibility of thunderstorms grounding flights, as well, Richter said.
“We’re used to the thunderstorms for summer travel season,” she said. “But they are becoming much more violent, and they are grounding many more flights.”
As climate change continues to worsen, regions that traditionally did not need air conditioning may need to brace for more heat waves by installing equipment to keep their homes cool.
In places like the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay Area, the majority of households are not equipped with central air conditioning. In 2021, when a historic heat wave struck the region, window and portable air conditioners were flying off the shelves, Jennifer Amann, senior fellow of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s building program, told ABC News.
Incorporating efficient cooling methods, like using the same pumps that heat homes to cool them, as well, and using efficient window air-conditioning units, will help households keep temperatures bearable in their homes, Amann said,
PHOTO: Ben Gallegos sits on the porch of his family’s home with his dog as the daytime high temperature soars toward triple digits, July 27, 2023, in north Denver. (David Zalubowski/AP)
Heat is the No.1 weather-related killer, with more than 600 people dying from heat-related illnesses every year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When temperatures do not cool down overnight, it exacerbates the risk to human health.
Buying an air conditioner is the short-term solution, but people will also need to adapt their homes to better deal with extreme heat, and builders will need to design new homes with more passive mechanisms to navigate the changing climate, Amann said.
MORE: Dangerous temperatures have been recorded in the US for weeks. Is the extreme heat coming to an end soon?
Countries in Europe like France, Italy, Spain, Romania and Germany have been the most affected by climate-related disasters over the past 20 years, an analysis by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found.
Domestically, Texas loses an average of $30 billion a year due to its climate and the large number of people working outdoors, according to a 2021 report by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
PHOTO: A tour guide fans herself while working in Times Square as temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York City. (John Minchillo/AP)
The cumulative global economic loss between 1992 and 2013 reached between $5 trillion and $29.3 trillion due to the impact of human-caused heat waves, according to a study published in 2022 in Science Advances.
The poorest countries in the hottest climates suffered the most, researchers found.
Heat also affects people’s moods, which is essentially survival mode kicking in, Van Susteren said.
“If we’re in a bad mood, we’re not buying,” she said.
In one image from the company Maxar Technologies, the historic area of Banyan Court — home to the island’s oldest living banyan tree, at 150 years old — appears to have mostly been reduced to ash.
Other images showed similar devastation in and around Lahaina Square, a shopping area, and a neighborhood on the southern end of the town of roughly 12,700.
“I still don’t know where my little brother is,” she said. “I don’t know where my stepdad is.”
The fires, which have also hit the island of Hawaii, have been fueled by strong, erratic winds from a Category 4 hurricane.
“This is not going to be a short journey,” said Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who is acting governor until the governor returns early from a trip. “It’s going to take weeks and maybe months to assess the full damage.”
Scientists warn that extreme ‘wet bulb temperature’ events are becoming more common with human-caused climate change (Frederic J. BROWN)
Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.
Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35-degree Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) warmth when coupled with 100 percent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.
At this point sweat — the body’s main tool for bringing down its core temperature — no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.
This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known “wet bulb temperature”, has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any “mass mortality events” linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.
But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.
For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.
But as global temperatures rise — last month was confirmed on Tuesday as the hottest in recorded history — scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.
The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.
Raymond’s research projected that wet bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35C at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5C degrees above preindustrial levels.
– ‘Really, really dangerous’ –
Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air.
This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.
The theorised human survival limit of 35C wet bulb temperature represents 35C of dry heat as well as 100 percent humidity — or 46C at 50 percent humidity.
To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.
They found that participants reached their “critical environmental limit” — when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise — at 30.6C wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35C.
The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach “really, really dangerous core temperatures,” Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.
– The most vulnerable –
Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35C wet bulb threshold.
Any such limits on human endurance are “wildly different for different people,” he told AFP.
“We don’t live in a vacuum — especially children,” said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health advisor at Save the Children.
Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.
Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 percent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.
People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.
Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down — for example in air conditioned spaces — is also a major factor.
Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.
“Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most,” Raymond said.
His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.
Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.
The world’s oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union’s climate observatory.
People in Hawaii flee into ocean to escape wildfires that are burning a popular Maui tourist town
Jennifer Sinco Kelleher – August 9, 2023
HONOLULU (AP) — Wildfires in Hawaii fanned by strong winds burned multiple structures in areas including historic Lahaina town, forcing evacuations and closing schools in several communities Wednesday, and rescuers pulled a dozen people escaping smoke and flames from the ocean.
The U.S. Coast Guard responded to areas where people went into the ocean to escape the fire and smoky conditions, the County of Maui said in a statement. The Coast Guard tweeted that a crew rescued 12 people from the water off Lahaina.
The county tweeted that multiple roads in Lahaina were closed with a warning: “Do NOT go to Lahaina town.”
Fire was widespread in Lahaina, including Front Street, an area of the town popular with tourists, County of Maui spokesperson Mahina Martin said in a phone interview early Wednesday. Traffic has been very heavy as people try to evacuate and officials asked people who weren’t in an evacuation area to shelter in place to avoid adding to the traffic, she said.
The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora, which was passing to the south of the island chain at a safe distance of 500 miles (805 kilometers), was partly to blame for gusts above 60 mph (97 kph) that knocked out power as night fell, rattled homes and grounded firefighting helicopters. Dangerous fire conditions created by strong winds and low humidity were expected to last through Wednesday afternoon, the weather service said.
Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke issued an emergency proclamation on behalf of Gov. Josh Green, who is traveling, and activated the Hawaii National Guard.
Officials were not aware of any deaths and knew of only one injury, a firefighter who was in stable condition at a hospital after experiencing smoke inhalation, Martin said There’s no count available for the number of structures affected by the fires or the number of people affected by evacuations, but Martin said there are four shelters open, with more than 1,000 people at the largest.
“This is so unprecedented,” Martin said, noting that multiple districts were affected. An emergency in the night is terrifying, she said, and the darkness makes it hard to gauge the extent of the damage.
“Right now it is all-hands-on-deck and we are anxious for daybreak,” she said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a disaster declaration to provide assistance with a fire that threatened about 200 homes in and around Kohala Ranch, a rural community with a population of more than 500 on the Big Island, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. When the request was made, the fire had burned more than 600 acres (243 hectares) and was uncontained. Much of Hawaii was under a red flag warning that continued Wednesday, and two other uncontrolled fires were burning on the Big Island and Maui, officials said.
Fire crews on Maui were battling multiple blazes concentrated in two areas: the popular tourist destination of West Maui and an inland, mountainous region. In west Maui 911 service was not available and residents were directed to call the police department.
Because of the wind gusts, helicopters weren’t able to dump water on the fires from the sky — or gauge more precise fire sizes — and firefighters were encountering roads blocked by downed trees and power lines as they worked the inland fires, Martin said.
About 14,500 customers in Maui were without power early Wednesday, according to poweroutage.us.
“It’s definitely one of the more challenging days for our island given that it’s multiple fires, multiple evacuations in the different district areas,” Martin said.
Winds were recorded at 80 mph (129 kph) in inland Maui and one fire that was believed to be contained earlier Tuesday flared up hours later with the big winds, she added.
“The fire can be a mile or more from your house, but in a minute or two, it can be at your house,” Fire Assistant Chief Jeff Giesea said.
In the Kula area of Maui, at least two homes were destroyed in a fire that engulfed about 1.7 square miles (4.5 square kilometers), Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said. About 80 people were evacuated from 40 homes, he said.
“We’re trying to protect homes in the community,” Big Island Mayor Mitch Roth said of evacuating about 400 homes in four communities in the northern part of the island. As of Tuesday, the roof of one house caught on fire, he said.
Fires in Hawaii are unlike many of those burning in the U.S. West. They tend to break out in large grasslands on the dry sides of the islands and are generally much smaller than mainland fires.
Fires were rare in Hawaii and on other tropical islands before humans arrived, and native ecosystems evolved without them. This means great environmental damage can occur when fires erupt. For example, fires remove vegetation. When a fire is followed by heavy rainfall, the rain can carry loose soil into the ocean, where it can smother coral reefs.
The island of Oahu, where Honolulu is located, also was dealing with power outages, downed power lines and traffic problems, said Adam Weintraub, communication director for Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.
There’s a very distinct possibility we could trigger our own extinction or, at the very least, greatly reduce our population while completely altering the way we currently live. Little things like going outside during daylight hours or growing food in the dirt could become relics of the past, along with birds, insects, whales and many other species. War, famine, pestilence and death — that dreaded equine quartet — threaten to topple our dominance on this planet. We are destroying our own home, sawing off the very branch we rest on.
Those who refute this reality, or climate change deniers, misinterpret the same sets of data showing a clear anthropological cause as being part of the “natural” cycle of the planet. Things are warming, they argue, and that is normal. Only, it really isn’t normal.
Climatologists and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades: Global temperatures and planetary homeostasis are spiraling out of control, and we’re to blame. The climate crisis is no longer a hypothetical future. It’s the tangible present, and the evidence is clear in every grueling heatwave, not-so-uncommon “freak” storm and raging wildfire.
On the opposite extreme is a vocal minority, the accelerationists and nihilists who accept that humanity is overwhelmingly destructive to nature, but argue our extinction would be a welcome relief. I received many such comments on social media after interviewing Peter Ward, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, about his “Medea hypothesis,” a theory that life is not a benevolent force and often causes its own extermination. Many species in Earth’s history became so successful that they wiped themselves out — and we could do the same.
In response to that article, many readers said something such as, “Humans are a virus and should be eradicated.” Obviously, inducing human extinction is an outcome for which only a very cynical personality would advocate. But what about the first part of that statement? Are humans really like a virus, a pathogen, a cancer?
Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado-based physician and author of the new book “Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth,” argues that human civilization indeed has many similarities with cancer. This isn’t a metaphor, but rather a literal diagnosis — and it can be addressed in the same way that an actual cancer diagnosis can be the first step to treatment.
Salon recently spoke with Hern about his new book, which acts partially as a memoir, textbook, dire diagnosis and poetic ode to a disintegrating planet, discussing the implications for such an urgent prognosis, a new name for the human species that reflects our true nature and how we can still fix this crisis.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
My opinion is that humans are part of nature — we are not separate from it. After I came across your book, I began asking myself, “Are humans really a cancer on the planet?” I thought, “Aren’t we part of this whole ecosystem?” I initially set out to disprove what you’re saying, but the argument you make is so extremely convincing. I know from your writing that when you were first conceptualizing the notion that humans are a cancer on the planet, it was very unpopular. But now it seems like this idea has earned some mainstream acceptance. Is that true?
This is a fundamental scientific and philosophical question. And, first of all, I agree with you that we are part of nature. We evolved in a natural ecosystem, and we have obviously very intimate close ties with other species, other animals. Humans are unique in that they have culture, although we’re learning that other animals have certain levels of culture also, like whales. So, we are really not unique in that sense, but we have a different and higher level of culture that allows us to dominate other species and ecosystems.
These are cultural adaptations that allow us to survive, but they have become malignant maladaptations because they are now threatening our survival and millions of other species. We have essentially made a decision at this point as a species to go extinct. That’s what we’re doing — we’re eliminating our biosphere and our planetary support system. Consciously or not, and I think mostly unconsciously.
When I first came onto this in the late ’60s, I was horrified. It’s not an analogy; nobody ever died from an analogy. It’s a diagnosis, and that’s different. The diagnosis is the same as the hypothesis. The guy comes into the emergency room with a sore belly, and he has right lower quadrant pain. Your diagnosis is appendicitis until proven otherwise. But that’s a hypothesis because he might have some other disease, or if it’s a woman, they might have an ovarian cyst.
I work with the idea from Karl Popper that science is not advanced by proving anything, but by disproving false hypotheses. The purpose of a hypothesis is to explain reality and predict events. This hypothesis [humans as a cancer] explains what we see going on in reality around us — and has for a long time — and it predicts what is going to happen. And that means the prognosis, in medical terms, for cancer is death. The cancer continues until the host organism dies.
The difference between us and a cancer — the only difference — is we can think, and we can decide not to be a cancer. If the diagnosis is correct, things will continue until we are extinct. The biosphere can’t go extinct; it can’t die, but we can alter it to the point that we can no longer survive. And that will take out millions of other organisms. Clearly, plenty of organisms are going to survive that process. They might even be more intelligent than us. I don’t know.
That’s sort of the general picture. And whether people accept this or want to even listen to it is another thing. For example, in the book, I talk about the guy who took over the anthropology section at AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] back in the early ’90s. He didn’t like this idea, and he wanted them to drop it from the schedule because his wife had cancer and he was very offended by it. I told him, “Well, I’m really sorry that your wife has cancer, and I certainly hope she recovers. This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife’s cancer.”
I hope people can see that because it’s such a good diagnosis. I mean, it really does fit the bill. You look at maps of cities and tumors, and you can see how they kind of grow similarly. But the similarities don’t end there.
The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem.
These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.
That’s only one example. We now have 10 or 15 other new characteristics of cancer, and the human species fits all of them. And so the disturbing thing about this? If you have any two of the first four characteristics of cancer, it’s cancer until proven otherwise. And cancer does not stop until the host organism has ceased to function, which for our purposes is the biosphere.
Now, I have given the book the name “Homo Ecophagus.” That is my new name for the human species, which currently has the scientific name of Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise, wise man, which makes us the most misnamed species on the planet. Homo ecophagus means the man who devours the ecosystem — and that’s what we are doing.
We are in the process of converting all plant, animal, organic and inorganic material on the planet into human biomass and its adaptive adjuncts or support systems. The evidence for that is all around us.
So, that’s the basic idea in a nutshell, and then the rest of the book is simply manifestations of this malignancy and an explanation of the analysis. And so, the next question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we do something about this? It’s very hard under the circumstances, for example, to think about Vladimir Putin sitting down with Zelensky if they can fix the ecosystem in Ukraine.
Right, it’s a very, very difficult problem. It’s the biggest problem our society faces right now. Literally, nothing else matters if we don’t address this problem.
That’s the point: It’s an existential crisis. Yes.
I have to say that it seems like we’re not going to solve this problem. I don’t want to be negative and despair that we’re all simply going to die from climate change. I recently made a move across the country from California to Illinois. Everywhere you go, you get that dedifferentiation that you speak of, where everything looks the same. Every freeway has the same strip malls. You see all these people in these giant pickup and semi trucks and all this overconsumption. I just don’t see people giving it up. I just don’t see it happening. Not fast enough, at least.
This is what I call the “ecophasic imperative.” Robert Ardrey, a brilliant anthropologist, about 40 or 50 years ago wrote a number of outstanding books. One is called “The Territorial Imperative,” which is about how humans have an imperative need to have and expand their territories.
One of the most lurid manifestations of what we have right now is Donald Trump. Another one is Putin and the war on Ukraine, but humans have been doing this forever. And now our malignant melanoma patients have been put in a position where we are devouring the Earth. We are devouring the ecosystem. We have an imperative to do that. Look at the open pit mines that we have of various kinds. The whole alternative energy programs depend on destroying certain ecosystems to get the rare metals that we need to do that stuff.
I do not want to be negative, either. I’m basically an optimistic and positive person. I’ve been my whole life. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives us a list of horribles, and it gets more horrible every year. But what’s the underlying dynamic? I say this is a malignant process going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is not new. When the Australian Aborigines arrived on the continent of Australia, they started changing the ecosystem in very dramatic ways, and a lot of species went extinct. My colleague here at the University of Colorado, Giff Miller, has been one of the people showing that it happened in North America. It happened in the Pacific Islands. It happens every place. Humans have made other species extinct wherever they show up.
Of course, it takes individual actions. The obvious side to that is people can make changes in their lives. I’m in Boulder, Colo, for example, where they have a lot of recycling going on, and people are very conscious of that. But, at the same time, you have China putting in a coal-fired power generation plant every week. So, it’s very hard to see how all these individual actions can really have that effect that we want.
Do you have hope for the future, or maybe feel despair about everything? I often get a little bit paralyzed and feel like there’s no point to anything, like we’re all just going to go off the cliff. I’m hoping something will change, that something will shift on a major level, that we’ll all kind of come together on this issue. But I feel like I’ve been waiting for that moment for years.
It’s hard to know how to answer your question when you ask me, “Is there hope?” One of my main answers — which is true — is that young people like you give me hope, people who are looking at this stuff and thinking about it and figuring out what to do. When I look at the current political scene in the United States, it’s very hard to be optimistic because we have a violent fascist movement that occupies the attention of at least a third, if not more, of the population, supporting a man who is a sociopathic criminal.
I think that we make the decisions about these situations — the environment and our survival — through our political process. I want to be optimistic. Let me just share a little example of something with you. A week ago, I went to New Mexico to attend a special memorial service for Dave Foreman.
The meeting was held in a campground outside of Los Alamos, and we were a scruffy-looking bunch of backpackers and tree huggers. I felt right at home with these wonderful people, who were some of the hardcore environmentalists of this country, and people who really, really were dedicated, spent their lives working on protecting the environment. We’ve been talking about people with advanced degrees, with PhDs in ecology and biology, wolf conservation, I don’t know what else.
They were an impressive bunch of people. I enjoyed meeting them, and I participated in this meeting. I admire Dave, who was a friend of mine. And I have his books, and they’re worth reading. OK, this is a highly energetic, wonderful, dedicated, altruistic group in this country. What’s been happening since they started Earth First!? Things are a lot worse than they were.
And it’s very hard to see how that has really influenced the broad scale of things, even though they’ve had a lot of very specific local victories. More people need to understand that we are in an impending extinction crisis for ourselves and for the rest of the ecosystem and other species. We are destroying the planet as we speak — as rapidly as possible — and that must stop. We must find ways to do things differently, and that’s going to make big changes in our lives.
And as concerning as these developments are, scientists have long worried about even more dramatic, looming and irreversible changes to the planet that could happen quickly. Even in the past year, there’s evidence some of these scenarios are becoming more likely.
A paper in the journal Science in 2022 looked at several climate “tipping points” – conditions beyond which changes become self-perpetuating and difficult or impossible to undo. While the concept raised the hackles of some scientists, who suggested it was overly simplistic, the paper suggested even the possibility of such no-going-back points provided compelling reasons to limit warming as much as possible.
But the news isn’t all bad: There’s some good news in the Amazon. And scientists continue to say that if humanity takes climate threats seriously and quickly moves to end carbon emissions, the scenarios below become less likely or at least less extreme.
Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter sooner rather than later:
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
As of July 18, Antarctic sea ice was more than 1 million square miles below the 1981-2010 average. That’s an area larger than the seven southwestern states, including Utah and Texas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It is also more than half a million square miles lower than last year, which had also been the previous record low.
In Greenland, temperatures over the country’s central-north ice sheet between 2001 and 2011 were the warmest in the past 1,000 years, said Maria Hörhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and author of a study published this year.
Critical Atlantic ocean currents could stall, reshape climate in US and Europe
What could happen: Massive ocean currents that move hot and cold water around could grind to a halt. Some studies have called it an “irreversible transition.”
When could it happen: New research suggests it could occur this century.
What would the effect on Earth be: Scientists aren’t sure, but some say a stoppage could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. It could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
What changed since last year? Recent analysis shows the current appears to be weakening or slowing down.
It’s far from certain and many scientists say there’s not enough data yet to tell if there’s a trend that could mean a sudden collapse is in the offing.
FILE – Smoke rises from a fire near a logging area in the Transamazonica highway region, in the municipality of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil, Sept. 17, 2022. Brazil has a major role to play in addressing climate change as home to the world’s largest rainforest, but after the Sunday, Oct. 2, election, the subject is less likely to come up than ever. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros, File) ORG XMIT: CLI301More
What could the effect on Earth be? The Amazon’s 2.5 million square mile rainforest, sometimes called “the lungs of the plant,” is so vast it creates half of its own rainfall and is home to 10% of the world’s species. It also stores a substantial amount of the world’s carbon.
As temperatures rise and droughts become more common, the ability of the forest to grow back after fires or logging is of concern. That’s especially a problem in the Amazon where the trees themselves capture water through their roots and then release moisture back through their leaves. It’s estimated a single tree can emit 265 gallons of water a day.
If drought or logging kills trees there may not be enough left to bring water to the area, meaning what grows back in their place would instead be grassland.
July 2, 2023 : Flames from the Donnie Creek wildfire burn along a ridge top north of Fort St. John, British Columbia.
Wildfires could reshape Alaska and Canada, turning forests into grassland
What could happen: Massive wildfires could mean North America’s vast northern forests – sometimes called “snow forests” – could face a future as mostly treeless grasslands.
What would the effect on Earth be: These cold-weather forests run across Alaska and Canada and are estimated to store more than 30% of all forest carbon on the planet. Without them, huge amounts of greenhouse gases would be released into the atmosphere, worsening global warming.
Forests have always burned but what’s happening now is on a different scale, in every part of the country, said Marc-André Parisien, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
This summer has been a historically bad fire season in Canada. As of August 4, a remarkable 1,054 active fires were burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
While boreal forests are highly adapted to wildfires, the climate in the forested areas is now hotter and windier than before, making it harder for the seedlings to reestablish themselves. The concern is that in some areas what grows back after these megafires might not be today’s endless forests but instead grassland and shrubland, interspersed with smaller areas of trees.
“The climate in the northern forests has always been changing since the end of the Ice Age,” Parisien said. “But just the sheer speed at which things are happening now is surprising.”
Underwater photo of coral bleaching and hard coral Acropora sp turns white due to high sea surface temperature and climate change
World’s coral reefs could be cooked by the ocean
What could happen: Rising ocean temperatures are literally cooking coral to death. If localized die-offs happened across the world’s oceans, it would fundamentally change and diminish undersea life.
When could it happen: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would result in between 70 and 90% of the world’s coral reefs disappearing – which could happen in the early 2030s.
What would the effect on Earth be: Corals are vital to the health of the oceans. Although they cover only 0.2% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least a quarter of all marine species. They provide safety for juvenile fish and are home to small organisms and fish that provide food for larger fish. A report released last year showed that almost 15% of the planet’s reefs have vanished since 2009.
Coral reefs can survive within only a relatively narrow temperature band. The coral that build the reefs get much of their food from algae living in their tissues. When the seawater is too warm, the coral’s stress response is to expel algae, causing the coral to turn white. The process is called coral bleaching, and if it lasts too long, the coral can starve – turning a thriving ecosystem into a cemetery of dead, white shells.
The Coral Restoration Foundation, a group centered around restoring and protecting Florida’s coral reefs, said it visited the Sombrero Reef off the Florida Keys on July 20 and found “100% coral mortality.” The discovery means all corals on the Sombrero Reef, a popular snorkeling area, have died and the reef will not recover on its own without active restoration, the foundation said.
Students from the Urban Homeschoolers in Atwater Village march through the neighborhood chanting and carrying signs on their way to the Los Angeles River and then an overpass on Interstate-5. Photo by Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY staff
Action, not despair
Even though it appears humanity is on track to miss the United Nations’ hoped-for limit of a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, giving up is not the answer, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
No specific number signifies that all hope is lost. Instead, it’s a call for action.
“It’s not like we fall off the edge of the world,” he said. “We can still make a big difference and every single tenth of a degree is enormously important.”
Why is leprosy spreading in Florida? What to know about recent rise in US cases
Caroline Kee – August 2, 2023
Cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, are on the rise in Florida, and the infectious disease may be endemic in the Southeastern United States, a new report suggests.
Despite its biblical-sounding name, leprosy not a disease of the past. Leprosy still occurs in more than 120 countries, and there are over 200,000 new cases reported every year, according to the World Health Organization.
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae, which affects the skin and nervous system.
“Leprosy is a pretty unusual infection in the United States, and cases had been dropping very steadily over a long period of time, but then recently, there’s been a bit of a slow uptick,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, tells TODAY.com.
Are there cases of leprosy in Florida?
Yes, there are cases of leprosy in Florida. So far this year, there have been 15 cases of leprosy in Florida, NBC affiliate WESH reported.
In 2020, 159 new leprosy cases were reported in the U.S., and Florida was among the top states reporting cases, according to a research letter in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There has been a drastic reduction in cases in the U.S. since the 1980s, per the CDC, but the number of cases of leprosy has more than doubled in Southeastern states over the last decade.
Why is leprosy spreading in Florida?
The short answer it’s still not known why leprosy is spreading in Florida or why it’s happening now. “Frankly, these cases are still are a bit of a mystery,” says Schaffner, adding that further public health investigation is needed.
Previously, leprosy in the U.S. affected people who had immigrated from leprosy-endemic countries, per the CDC. “Most of the cases we’ve seen in the past have been in people who came from their homeland where there was much more leprosy,” says Schaffner.
But more recently, the rate of new diagnoses in people born outside of the U.S. has been declining, even though the incidence of leprosy in the U.S. has been increasing overall, the CDC said in its report.
About 34% of new cases between 2015 and 2020 appear to have been acquired locally, per the CDC report. In other words, more and more people are being infected with leprosy in the U.S., Schaffner adds — and Florida may be a hotspot.
Additionally, the CDC said several of the recent cases in Florida showed no evidence of traditional risk factors. The report highlights a case of leprosy in a 54-year-old Florida man who reported that he had no known contact with an infected person, no exposure to armadillos (a known animal reservoir for the bacteria that causes leprosy), and no travel history to leprosy-endemic countries.
The CDC report noted that many Florida residents, like the 54-year-old, spend time a lot of time outdoors, so “environmental reservoirs” should be investigated “as a potential source of transmission.”
Where is leprosy in Florida?
Central Florida seems to be where most of the cases of leprosy in the state are located, based on recent data. Of the 15 cases reported so far this year, most were in Brevard County, in East Central Florida.
Of the 2020 data analyzed in the CDC report, Central Florida accounted for about 81% of the cases reported in the state in 2020 and nearly one-fifth of cases reported nationwide, according to the CDC report. The agency did not specify where in Central Florida had the most leprosy cases.
By most definitions, Central Florida includes the Greater Orlando area and sometimes the Tampa Bay area. Other major cities in Central Florida, according to VisitFlorida.com, include St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Palm Bay, Lakeland and Deltona.
How common is leprosy in Florida?
The rate of leprosy in Florida overall is low, as is the case in all of the U.S. So far this year, only 15 cases have been reported in the state. With a population of 22 million across the whole state, that’s a very low risk of coming in contact with someone with leprosy.
That said, the recent trends and cases add to a growing body of evidence that leprosy is endemic in the Southeastern U.S., namely in Florida. Endemic means a virus is consistently present in a population within a geographic area, according to Medline Plus.
“I keep my fingers on the pulse of communicable diseases in this country, and that number (159 cases in the U.S.) surprised me. It was higher than I thought,” says Schaffner.
There are no Leprosy-related travel warnings for Florida, but the CDC said in its report that travel to Florida should be considered during contact tracing for leprosy in any state.
It’s also important to keep in mind that leprosy is “usually difficult to acquire and requires close, persistent, prolonged contact with a person who has leprosy,” says Schaffner. You cannot get leprosy from casual contact like hugging, shaking hands, or sitting next to someone who has leprosy, per the CDC.
“Leprosy is not communicable in the classic sense the way influenza or COVID-19 is,” says Schaffner. According to the CDC, the risk of getting Leprosy is very low because more than 95% of people have natural immunity.
It’s not fully understood how leprosy is spread, per the CDC, but it is thought to be spread through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. There is also evidence humans can contract leprosy from armadillos, a known animal reservoir for the bacteria, says Schaffner. In this case, transmission would also require prolonged contact with the animal — fortunately most people aren’t getting that close to armadillos, he adds.
Is there a cure for leprosy?
“We used to think it was untreatable, but we can treat and cure this disease now,” says Schaffner. Leprosy is typically treated with a combination of antibiotics and treatment usually lasts one to two years, per the CDC.
“It is a very slowly multiplying bacteria in the body, so you have to take the appropriate antibiotics for a long period of time,” says Schaffner.
If left untreated, leprosy can cause permanent damage to the nerves, skin, hands, feet and eyes, which may result in paralysis or blindness, per the CDC. Early diagnosis is important to avoid long-term disfigurement and disability from the disease.
Previously, leprosy was thought of to be highly contagious and patients were isolated in remote areas, Schaffner explains, but today the disease can be safely managed at home.
Pictures of leprosy
Lepromatous leprosy in a 54-year-old man in central Florida in 2022. (CDC)
Leprosy can cause skin symptoms, including lesions, discolored or flat rashes, thick or stiff patches of skin, growths and painless ulcers (often on the feet) that do not heal over time, according to the CDC.
Disfigured feet on someone with leprosy. (Shutterstitch / Getty Images/ iStockphoto)
Symptoms affecting the nerves include numbness in the affected areas of the skin, muscle weakness, nerve pain, paralysis and eye issues. Leprosy can also affect the mucous membranes lining the nose, mouth, and inside of the eyes and cause bleeding, tissue damage, impaired speech and vision loss, per Medline Plus.
CDC issues leprosy warning for people making Florida travel plans
Cindy Krischer Goodman, Sun Sentinel – August 1, 2023
Omar Havana/Getty Images North America/TNS
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, are surging in Florida and should be considered when making travel plans.
The infectious disease primarily affects the skin and nervous system and can be easy to treat if caught early.
Leprosy has been historically uncommon in the United States, but has more than doubled in the South over the last 10 years. In a case report issued Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Central Florida has accounted for 81% of reported cases in the state and almost one-fifth of reported cases nationwide.
Of the 159 new leprosy cases reported in the United States in 2020, Florida was among the top reporting states with nearly 30 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 19 cases from July 2022 to July 2023, with one South Florida case in Palm Beach County.
The CDC said if untreated, the disease can progress to paralysis, blindness, the loss of one’s eyebrows, physical disfigurement, and even the crippling of hands and feet. Symptoms include loss of feeling in hands and feet, nasal congestion and possibly dry, stiff, sometimes painful skin.
The warning comes because of what health officials learned when examining patients diagnosed with leprosy.
“Whereas leprosy in the United States previously affected persons who had immigrated from leprosy-endemic areas, about 34% of new case-patients during 2015–2020 appeared to have locally acquired the disease,” the CDC report says. According to the World Health Organization, medical officials report more than 200,000 cases of leprosy every year in more than 120 countries. While the reason behind the rising cases in Florida is unclear, there is some support for the theory that international migration to Central Florida of people with leprosy is fueling the locally-acquired transmission.
“Prolonged person-to-person contact through respiratory droplets is the most widely recognized route of transmission,” the CDC report says.
When contact tracing cases in Central Florida, health officials found no associated risk factors, including travel, zoonotic exposure, occupational association, or personal contacts. “The absence of traditional risk factors in many recent cases of leprosy in Florida, coupled with the high proportion of residents who spend a great deal of time outdoors, supports the investigation into environmental reservoirs as a potential source of transmission,” the report says.
Because Florida, particularly Central Florida, may represent an endemic location for leprosy, the CDC recommends that physicians consider leprosy if patients who recently have traveled Florida show symptoms.
