Contribution of climate change to the spatial expansion of West Nile virus in Europe

West Nile virus (WNV) is an emerging mosquito-borne pathogen in Europe where it represents a new public health threat. While climate change has been cited as a potential driver of its spatial expansion on the continent, a formal evaluation of this causal relationship is lacking. Here, we investigate the extent to which WNV spatial expansion in Europe can be attributed to climate change while accounting for other direct human influences such as land-use and human population changes. To this end, we trained ecological niche models to predict the risk of local WNV circulation leading to human cases to then unravel the isolated effect of climate change by comparing factual simulations to a counterfactual based on…

• GC
  Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance

  Award: UL1 TR001863
• VS
  Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum
• EC
  European Commission

  Awards: 801505, 874850
• EC
  European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
• FD
  Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS

  Awards: 4515.22, G098321N, F.4515.22
• FW
  Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

  Award: G098321N
• VR
  Vlaamse regering
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: UL1 TR001863, TR001863
• DE
  Departement Economie, Wetenschap en Innovatie
• NC
  National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences

  Awards: TR001863, UL1 TR001863