WHAT ARE THE HEALTH CONSEQUENCES OF DROUGHT?

• Water supplies dry up, and food becomes scarce. Starvation and malnutrition can result. In wealthier communities, food and drinking water can be brought in from the outside.



• Having enough clean, fresh water is essential. Lack of water means poor hygiene. Inability to wash or properly remove human waste increases the risk of disease.



• Water becomes contaminated. Drinking and cooking water mix with wastewater. Microbes—including bacteria, viruses and parasites—can lurk in water supplies, causing diarrheal diseases that could lead to death. These include trachoma, scabies, typhoid, hepatitis A , and cholera.




Scabies results when microscopic parasites burrow into the skin. Source: CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention



• Dry weather can affect disease-carrying rodents. In need of food, rodents leave remote habitats and move to where food is stored—people's homes. Diseases such as hantavirus and flea-borne plague are more easily transmitted. If a drought follows a period when rodent populations are particularly high—often during abundant rain, with lots of plants and insects to eat—then there are that many more rodents around when the drought hits. So the risk of disease increases.
  
  

  Deer mice are major carriers of hantavirus. Source: CDC: All About Hantavirus