Publications by authors named "Xavier Rodo"

Kawasaki disease (kDa) has remained a medical mystery for the last five decades with a wide array of hypothesis about potential aetiological factors, that have never been confirmed. In this brief note, I revised the state-of-the-art for the so-called 'wind hypothesis', claiming that the nature and types of aerosols, particularly fine ones, can account for a central part of this research avenue and the relation to kDa. Characterizing their chemical nature, in particular of the composition in trace elements, as well as their biological components (bacteria, fungi and viruses) stands up today as the most promising avenue towards constraining the range of environmental factors modulating or being responsible for this long-debated disease.

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More than 110,000 Europeans died as a result of the record-breaking temperatures of 2022 and 2023. A new generation of impact-based early warning systems, using epidemiological models to transform weather forecasts into health forecasts for targeted population subgroups, is an essential adaptation strategy to increase resilience against climate change. Here, we assessed the skill of an operational continental heat-cold-health forecasting system.

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The existence of viable human pathogens in bioaerosols which can cause infection or affect human health has been the subject of little research. In this study, data provided by 10 tropospheric aircraft surveys over Japan in 2014 confirm the existence of a vast diversity of microbial species up to 3,000 m height, which can be dispersed above the planetary boundary layer over distances of up to 2,000 km, thanks to strong winds from an area covered with massive cereal croplands in Northeast (NE) Asia. Microbes attached to aerosols reveal the presence of diverse bacterial and fungal taxa, including potential human pathogens, originating from sewage, pesticides, or fertilizers.

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Background: Explanations for the genesis and propagation of cholera pandemics since 1817 have remained elusive. Evolutionary pathogen change is presumed to have been a dominant factor behind the 7th "El Tor" pandemic, but little is known to support this hypothesis for preceding pandemics. The role of anomalous climate in facilitating strain replacements has never been assessed.

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While the air microbiome and its diversity are essential for human health and ecosystem resilience, comprehensive air microbial diversity monitoring has remained rare, so that little is known about the air microbiome's composition, distribution, or functionality. Here we show that nanopore sequencing-based metagenomics can robustly assess the air microbiome in combination with active air sampling through liquid impingement and tailored computational analysis. We provide fast and portable laboratory and computational approaches for air microbiome profiling, which we leverage to robustly assess the taxonomic composition of the core air microbiome of a controlled greenhouse environment and of a natural outdoor environment.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A global search revealed a lack of dedicated methods for studying ARGs in airborne particles, with most research relying on traditional microbial culture and aerosol sampling techniques.
  • * The review highlights a significant gap in knowledge about bioaerosol ARGs in freshwater environments, emphasizing the need for further research to understand their impact on water safety for drinking and recreation.
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In 2013, the Caribbean underwent an unprecedented epidemic of Chikungunya that affected 29 islands and mainland territories throughout the Caribbean in the first six months. Analysing the spread of the epidemic among the Caribbean islands, we show that the initial patterns of the epidemic can be explained by a network model based on the flight connections among islands. The network does not follow a random graph model and its topology is likely the product of geo-political relationships that generate increased connectedness among locations sharing the same language.

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Polycystic Echinococcosis (PE), a neglected life-threatening zoonotic disease caused by the cestode is endemic in the Amazon. Despite being treatable, PE reaches a case fatality rate of around 29% due to late or missed diagnosis. PE is sustained in Pan-Amazonia by a complex sylvatic cycle.

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Heatwaves are one of the leading causes of climate-induced mortality. Using the examples of recent heatwaves in Europe, the United States and Asia, we illustrate how the communication of dangerous conditions based on temperature maps alone can lead to insufficient societal perception of health risks. Comparison of maximum daily values of temperature with physiological heat stress indices accounting for impacts of both temperature and humidity, illustrates substantial differences in geographical extent and timing of their respective peak values during these recent events.

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Article Synopsis
  • Daylight saving time (DST) changes the clock by moving it forward one hour in spring and back one hour in fall, which can mess with people's sleep and health.
  • A study looked at how DST affected death rates in 16 European countries from 1998 to 2012 and found that fewer people died in spring right after changing the clocks, but more died in fall.
  • The study also found a pattern where deaths were lowest on Sundays and highest on Mondays, which was the same all year round for people over 40.
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The MetaSUB Consortium, founded in 2015, is a global consortium with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, scientists, bioinformaticians, engineers, and designers, with members from more than 100 countries across the globe. This network has continually collected samples from urban and rural sites including subways and transit systems, sewage systems, hospitals, and other environmental sampling. These collections have been ongoing since 2015 and have continued when possible, even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Life-long serotype-specific immunity following dengue virus infection may not always occur, but the true extent of this effect is unknown. Analysis of more than 20 years of monotypic epidemics in the isolated French Polynesian islands revealed that whilst the risk of symptomatic dengue infection did conform to the classical paradigms of homotypic immunity and increased disease risk in heterotypic secondary infections, incorporation of waning immunity improved the ability of epidemiological models to capture the observed epidemic dynamics. Not only does this show how inclusion of waning immunity into classical models can reveal important facets of the immune response to natural dengue virus infection, it also has significant ramifications for vaccine development and implementation in dengue endemic areas.

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There are important questions surrounding the potential contribution of outdoor and indoor air quality in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and perpetuation of COVID-19 epidemic waves. Environmental health may be a critical component of COVID-19 prevention. The public health community and health agencies should consider the evolving evidence in their recommendations and statements, and work to issue occupational guidelines.

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The roles of climate and true seasonal signatures in the epidemiology of emergent pathogens, and that of SARS-CoV-2 in particular, remain poorly understood. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show, for COVID-19 cases, strong consistent negative effects of both temperature and absolute humidity at large spatial scales. At finer spatial resolutions, we substantiate these connections during the seasonal rise and fall of COVID-19.

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Background: Europe has emerged as a major climate change hotspot, both in terms of an increase in seasonal averages and climate extremes. Projections of temperature-attributable mortality, however, have not been comprehensively reported for an extensive part of the continent. Therefore, we aim to estimate the future effect of climate change on temperature-attributable mortality across Europe.

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A counterargument to the importance of climate change for malaria transmission has been that regions where an effect of warmer temperatures is expected, have experienced a marked decrease in seasonal epidemic size since the turn of the new century. This decline has been observed in the densely populated highlands of East Africa at the center of the earlier debate on causes of the pronounced increase in epidemic size from the 1970s to the 1990s. The turnaround of the incidence trend around 2000 is documented here with an extensive temporal record for malaria cases for both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in an Ethiopian highland.

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The Covid-19 death rate increases exponentially with age, and the main risk factors are having underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, severe chronic respiratory disease and cancer. These characteristics are consistent with the multi-step model of disease. We applied this model to Covid-19 case fatality rates (CFRs) from China, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Japan.

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After the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic out of China, evolution in the pandemic worldwide shows dramatic differences among countries. In Europe, the situation of Italy first and later Spain has generated great concen, and despite other countries show better prospects, large uncertainties yet remain on the future evolution and the efficacy of containment, mitigation, or attack strategies. This Manuscript was originally written in the last days of March as a way to report on the first current wave of the pandemic.

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Early studies of weather, seasonality, and environmental influences on COVID-19 have yielded inconsistent and confusing results. To provide policy-makers and the public with meaningful and actionable environmentally-informed COVID-19 risk estimates, the research community must meet robust methodological and communication standards.

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The lack of effective pharmaceutical interventions for SARS-CoV-2 raises the possibility of COVID-19 recurrence. We explore different post-confinement scenarios by using a stochastic modified SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered) model that accounts for the spread of infection during the latent period and also incorporates time-decaying effects due to potential loss of acquired immunity, people's increasing awareness of social distancing and the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Our results suggest that lockdowns should remain in place for at least 60 days to prevent epidemic growth, as well as a potentially larger second wave of SARS-CoV-2 cases occurring within months.

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Understanding the transition of epidemic to endemic dengue transmission remains a challenge in regions where serotypes co-circulate and there is extensive human mobility. French Polynesia, an isolated group of 117 islands of which 72 are inhabited, distributed among five geographically separated subdivisions, has recorded mono-serotype epidemics since 1944, with long inter-epidemic periods of circulation. Laboratory confirmed cases have been recorded since 1978, enabling exploration of dengue epidemiology under monotypic conditions in an isolated, spatially structured geographical location.

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