WEATHER | DISEASE | WATER | HUNGER | AIR POLLUTION | ALLERGIES 
Prolonged droughts and changes in climate have played a role in the emergence of new diseases such as Hantavirus, as seen in the Southwestern United States in 1993. Hantavirus emerged when rodent populations blossomed in response to heavy rainfalls following a six-year drought.
Evidence indicates that extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation, floods, droughts, and hurricanes have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration over the past century and climate models predict that this trend will continue as global warming continues. High temperatures in 1993 killed 750 people in Chicago and hospitalized thousands more. In 2003 the heat wave that hit Europe killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed agricultural crops. During a heat wave in the summer of 2005 in the United States over 200 cities recorded new record high temperatures. Eight of the ten warmest years on record have occurred in the last decade.
While increasing global temperatures will create heavier precipitation events in some regions, acceleration of land-surface drying will also mean more frequent, more severe drought in others. Precipitation may come in irregular intervals and many areas throughout the United States will experience heavier downpours. Already, the annual number of days with precipitation exceeding two and four inches in a 24-hour period has increased over the 20th century.
Death and injury are the direct health impacts most commonly associated with extreme weather events. However, the environmental hazards left behind by natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes can also have a number of serious secondary health effects. For example, malaria epidemics often follow heavy rainfall, which can be exacerbated by displacement of populations due to flooding; droughts can lead to huge forest fires causing smoke inhalation and subsequent respiratory problems; and studies have demonstrated that a high percentage of natural disaster survivors exhibit clinically significant distress or diagnosable disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression and other anxiety disorders.
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