Climate change contributes to this expansion of the Western Nile virus towards northern Europe, as shown by a study carried out in particular by the Lab laboratory of the ULB and published in 2024.
Emmanuel Bottiaux, infectiologist at the insuitut of tropical medicine in Antwerp, has an analysis of the same type: “TIt is now the years, we have here and there in Spain, in Croatia, in France, in Italy, an epidemic with a virus that we considered before exotic, as a tropical. And now it appears there. This remains clusters (contagion households, note). There has not yet been a serious epidemic “.
It is clearly linked to warming.
Emmanuel Bottiaux, infectiologist at the insuitut of tropical medicine in Antwerp
“But yes, it is completely linked to transmission vectors that become more abundant and it is clearly linked to warming. “, Complete Emmanuel Bottiaux.
In recent years, human cases have been reported for the first time in Germany (2019 and 2020) and the Netherlands (2020).
This virus was identified in 1937 in Uganda. After being responsible for epidemics in Africa, in the Middle East, Western Asia and already in Europe (in Camargue) in the 1960s, he saw his epidemiology evolve. As Sciensano reports, “At the end of the 1990s, the epidemiological data of the Western Nile Virus present a deep change, under the influence of many factors, in particular environmental, such as temperature (modulating both mosquitoes and extrinsic incubation of the virus) and the presence of wetlands located on the roads of migratory birds.”
This is the reason why the European Agency for Disease Control, the ECDC, has started reinforced monitoring more than 10 years ago: member countries must notify all cases in real time, and the ECDC writes a weekly report.
