Climate change and extreme weather events to intensify West Nile virus activity

Drought–monsoon cycling, not temperature alone, is linked to intensified West Nile virus activity in Arizona, with models projecting increasing transmission through 2100 under all scenarios.

• Why it matters: Outbreak forecasting at public-health-relevant scales is still difficult for vector-borne zoonoses, limiting timely response to West Nile virus spread.
• What they did: Using a decade of mosquito surveillance data and time-lagged weather inputs in a random forest framework, the study built weekly, fine-scale spatial models for Culex abundance and West Nile virus occurrence across Arizona.
• The result: Viral occurrence was classified with 98.9% accuracy and explained 65.3% of weekly county-level human case variation (cases lagging by one week), while extreme summer temperatures did not reduce activity and projections through 2100 indicate intensification under all climate scenarios.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.