Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how

NEW YORK—As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy, another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases—threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate.

At a symposium held yesterday at the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers from public health, climate, medicine and other fields gathered to discuss some of the big questions that remain in uniting these evolving fields. "The relation between climate change and infectious diseases is highly controversial to say the least," Richard Ostfeld, of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said here.