Podgorica, (MINA) – Climate change affects the rates of mortality, injuries and incidence of infectious and non-infectious diseases, and it can also lead to the emergence of new diseases, the Public Health Institute (IJZ) has said.

IJZ told the MINA News Agency that it is difficult to quantify the impacts of climate change on health, due to, as they said, complex mutual influence between climate change and the effects of adopting to it.

Asked if the climate change reflects on the health of the citizens of Montenegro, IJZ recalled that monitoring and evaluation of the climate in Montenegro demonstrated that the heat waves are becoming more frequent, as well as that although they demonstrate high variability in length, long term speaking, the trend of continuous growth of length of their duration is visible.

Asked if heat waves and climate change can result in spread of new diseases, IJZ responded that they can, explaining that it is in particular true for the vector-borne diseases, when, due to climate change, vectors (in particular mosquitoes and ticks) spread to new regions.

IJZ noted that, another outcome of climate change, is spread and seasonal variations of infectious diseases among people, adding that it implies spread of existing infectious diseases to the areas where they didn’t exist before, but also occurrence of new infectious diseases.

When asked whether the increased number of respiratory diseases can be linked to air pollution, the IJZ pointed out that air pollution and climate change are strongly connected.

“Air pollution causes climate change, and climate change causes changes in air quality. Climate change leads to the increase in concentrations of ground-level ozone, which is very harmful to health, increases people’s exposure to allergens such as pollen, and contributes to the deterioration of air quality”, IJZ explains.