Impact of global warming on parasitic diseases of livestock

Climate change is one of the most important factors that play a key role in emergence and re-emergence of new parasitic infections. One of the most challenging tasks to livestock production is parasitism, which is directly influenced by a change in climate. This is especially true for helminth parasites where survival and development of free-living stages as well as intermediate hosts like snails is chiefly affected by temperature and moisture. Climate change also influences arthropod-borne infections since survival period of arthropods such as ticks and mosquitoes increases with increase in environmental temperature. Besides this, their disease transmission capacity also increases thereby increasing protozoan diseases. The paucity of long-term predictions of helminth risk under climate change has driven us to explore optimal modelling approaches and identify current bottlenecks to generate meaningful predictions. Such long-term predictions will help to identify potential risks and highlight opportunities for control. The aim of the present paper is to review the impact of climate change on parasites which are profoundly affected by meteorological factors.