New! Sign up for our free email newsletter.
Science News
from research organizations

Does La Niña weather pattern lead to flu pandemics?

Date:
January 16, 2012
Source:
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Summary:
Worldwide pandemics of influenza caused widespread death and illness in 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009. A new study examining weather patterns around the time of these pandemics finds that each of them was preceded by La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific. Since the La Niña pattern is known to alter the migratory patterns of birds, the scientists theorize that altered migration patterns promote the development of dangerous new strains of influenza.
Share:
FULL STORY

Worldwide pandemics of influenza caused widespread death and illness in 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. A new study examining weather patterns around the time of these pandemics finds that each of them was preceded by La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific.

The study's authors -- Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health -- note that the La Niña pattern is known to alter the migratory patterns of birds, which are thought to be a primary reservoir of human influenza. The scientists theorize that altered migration patterns promote the development of dangerous new strains of influenza.

The study findings are published in the journal PNAS.

To examine the relationship between weather patterns and influenza pandemics, the researchers studied records of ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific in the fall and winter before the four most recent flu pandemics emerged. They found that all four pandemics were preceded by below-normal sea surface temperatures -- consistent with the La Niña phase of the ElNiño-Southern Oscillation. This La Niña pattern develops in the tropical Pacific Ocean every two to seven years.

The authors cite other research showing that the La Niña pattern alters the migration, stopover time, fitness, and interspecies mixing of migratory birds. These conditions could favor the kind of gene swapping -- or genetic reassortment -- that creates novel and therefore potentially more infectious variations of the influenza virus.

"We know that pandemics arise from dramatic changes in the influenza genome. Our hypothesis is that La Niña sets the stage for these changes by reshuffling the mixing patterns of migratory birds, which are a major reservoir for influenza," says Jeffrey Shaman, PhD, Mailman School assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences and co-author of the study.

Changes in migration not only alter the pattern of contact among bird species, they could also change the ways that birds come into contact with domestic animals like pigs. Gene-swapping between avian and pig influenza viruses was a factor in the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

While a recent paper posited a link between influenza pandemics and strong El Niño events, authors of the current paper note that this 2011 analysis was based on some flawed data. They propose to test the La Niña-influenza theory by studying influenza genetics, avian migration patterns and climate data.


Story Source:

Materials provided by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. J. Shaman, M. Lipsitch. Fostering Advance in Interdisciplinary Climate Science Sackler Colloquium: The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-pandemic Influenza connection: Coincident or causal? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107485109

Cite This Page:

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "Does La Niña weather pattern lead to flu pandemics?." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 January 2012. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116154457.htm>.
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. (2012, January 16). Does La Niña weather pattern lead to flu pandemics?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 18, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116154457.htm
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "Does La Niña weather pattern lead to flu pandemics?." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116154457.htm (accessed March 18, 2024).

Explore More

from ScienceDaily

RELATED STORIES