Xavier Rodo

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Verified

Xavier verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD in numerical ecology
• ICREA Research Professor at Instituto de Salud Global de Barcelona

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 acco...

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 cha...

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 pla...

Through its atmospheric teleconnections, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) shifts and disrupts weather and climate patterns far beyond the equatorial Pacific where it occurs, and occasionally has catastrophic consequences in many countries of the world. It is also the largest source of seasonal and interannual climate predictability. Despite its...

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 replacem...

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 m...

California is one of the major uncertainty hotspots for climate change, as climate models have historically been split between projecting wetter and drier future conditions over the region. We analysed the future (mid‐century and end‐century) projections of California's winter precipitation changes from the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Proj...

Previous studies have indicated a large model disagreement in the future projections of precipitation changes over the regions featuring Mediterranean climate. Many of these highly populated regions have been experiencing major droughts in the recent decades, raising concerns about future precipitation changes and their impacts. Here we investigate...

While the air microbiome and its diversity are known to be essential for human health and ecosystem resilience, the current lack of holistic air microbial diversity monitoring means that little is known about the air microbiome's composition, distribution, or functional effects. We here show that nanopore shotgun sequencing can robustly assess the...

The development of effective Early Warning Systems (EWS) for climate-driven zoonotic diseases has been hindered by a lack of predictors with adequate lead time for effective interventions. Atmosphere-Ocean coupled phenomena present predictability beyond the atmospheric deterministic limits and therefore are potentially useful climate drivers to be...

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 conn...

Polycystic Echinococcosis (PE), a neglected life- threatening zoonotic disease caused by the cestode Echinococcus vogeli, 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. The hunting of its infected intermed...

Air pollution (urban, industrial or rural) has been linked to a myriad human ailment despite clear mechanistic associations are not often thoroughly established. Daily variability of fine aerosols in a surveillance campaign in south Japan shows a striking coevolution between their trace elements (metal and metalloid, MM) content and Kawasaki Diseas...

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 temperatur...

Background The lack of previous exposure to arbovirus and the ongoing geographical expansion of viable vector populations has fostered the implementation of preventive strategies in those areas more prone to disease importation. Catalonia receives a wealth of travelers from Southeast Asia, South America and the Caribbean and around 700 cases of imp...

Daylight saving time (DST) consists in a one-hour advancement of legal time in spring offset by a backward transition of the same magnitude in fall. It creates a minimal circadian misalignment that could disrupt sleep and homoeostasis in susceptible individuals and lead to an increased incidence of pathologies and accidents during the weeks immedia...

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 sys...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 tempe...

Explanations for the genesis and propagation of recurrent cholera pandemics since 1817 have remained elusive. Evolutionary change of the pathogen 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. We investigate the concomitant roles of climate and putat...

Climate change can both facilitate zoonotic spillovers and have an effect on transmission chains. These effects, alongside human behavior and awareness, need to be integrated in pandemic forecasting models.

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...

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 (...

The role of climate in the population dynamics of COVID-19 remains poorly understood, and a true seasonal signature has remained elusive. Data from both hemispheres and the second wave provide opportunities to further examine climatic drivers. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show consistent negative effects...

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 co...

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. When COVID-19 be...

During the summer of 2018, a widespread drought developed over Northern and Central Europe. The increase in temperature and the reduction of soil moisture have influenced carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems in various ways, such as a reduction of photosynthesis, changes in ecosystem respiration, or allowi...

Between October 2018 ‐ May 2019, sea surface temperature conditions in the central‐eastern tropical Pacific indicated a mild El Niño event. In May 2019, the global El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecast consensus was that these generally weak warm patterns will persist at least until the end of the northern hemisphere summer. El Niño and its...

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 e...

Anthropogenic pollution has frequently been linked to myriad human ailments despite clear mechanistic links are yet lacking, a fact that severely downgraded its actual relevance. Now a prominent unnoticed sub-weekly cycle (SWC) of 3.5 days is uncovered in the long-term epidemiological records of Kawasaki disease (KD) in Japan, a mysterious vasculit...

Covid-19 death has a different relationship with age than is the case for other severe respiratory pathogens. The Covid-19 death rate increases exponentially with age, and the main risk factors are age itself, as well as having underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, severe chronic respiratory disease and cance...

After the spread of SARS-CoV-2 epidemic out of China, the world approaches the 2 million declared infected cases and death toll rises well above the 100 thousand. The course of pandemic evolution has shown great differences among countries and not much is yet known about the level of generated immunity, which might appear not to be long-lasting. In...

After the spread of 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 concern, and despite other countries show better prospects, large uncertainties yet remain on the future evolution and the efficacy of conta...

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 si...

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) causes severe acute respiratory illness with a case fatality rate (CFR) of 35,5%. The highest number of MERS-CoV cases are from Saudi-Arabia, the major worldwide hotspot for this disease. In the absence of neither effective treatment nor a ready-to-use vaccine and with yet an incomplete unders...

Recent advances on the environmental determinants of Kawasaki Disease have pointed to the important role of the atmospheric transport of a still unknown agent potentially triggering the disease. The hypothesis arose from an innovative methodology combining expertise in climate dynamics, the analysis of ocean and atmosphere data, the use of dispersi...

Aims Mobile Airways Sentinel NetworK (MASK) belongs to the Fondation Partenariale MACVIA-LR of Montpellier, France and aims to provide an active and healthy life to rhinitis sufferers and to those with asthma multimorbidity across the life cycle, whatever their gender or socio-economic status, in order to reduce health and social inequities incurre...

A wide range of research has promised new tools for forecasting infectious disease dynamics, but little of that research is currently being applied in practice, because tools do not address key public health needs, do not produce probabilistic forecasts, have not been evaluated on external data, or do not provide sufficient forecast skill to be use...

The theoretical predictability limit of El Niño–Southern Oscillation has been shown to be on the order of years, but long-lead predictions of El Niño (EN) and La Niña (LN) are still lacking. State-of-the-art forecasting schemes traditionally do not predict beyond the spring barrier. Recent efforts have been dedicated to the improvement of dynamical...

Background: In all societies, the burden and cost of allergic and chronic respiratory diseases are increasing rapidly. Most economies are struggling to deliver modern health care effectively. There is a need to support the transformation of the health care system into integrated care with organizational health literacy. Main body: As an example...

Background: Mobile technology may help to better understand the adherence to treatment. MASK-rhinitis (Mobile Airways Sentinel NetworK for allergic rhinitis) is a patient-centred ICT system. A mobile phone app (the Allergy Diary) central to MASK is available in 22 countries. Objectives: To assess the adherence to treatment in allergic rhinitis pat...

Long-lead forecasts of El Niño events are lacking despite their enormous societal and economic impacts. These climatic events lead to floods and droughts in many tropical regions, and damage agriculture and the economy in poor countries. Due to their impact on local climate, they can also affect human health by increasing the risk of vector-borne d...

Previous studies have consistently shown the recurrent relationship between macroeconomic cycles and changes in mortality trends, so that recessions are generally associated with periods of faster life expectancy rise, and periods of economic growth with slower reductions or even increases in mortality trends. Here we analyze the link between annua...

Allergic rhinitis (AR) is impacted by allergens and air pollution but interactions between air pollution, sleep and allergic diseases are insufficiently understood. POLLAR (Impact of air POLLution on sleep, Asthma and Rhinitis) is a project of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT Health). It will use a freely-existing applicatio...

BACKGROUND: Collecting data on the localization of users is a key issue for the MASK (Mobile Airways Sentinel networK: the Allergy Diary) App. Data anonymization is a method of sanitization for privacy. The European Commission's Article 29 Working Party stated that geolocation information is personal data.To assess geolocation using the MASK method...

The ClimaDat station at Gredos (GIC3) has been continuously measuring atmospheric (dry air) mixing ratios of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), as well as meteorological parameters, since November 2012. In this study we investigate the atmospheric variability of CH4 mixing ratios between 2013 and 2015 at GIC3 with the help of co-located observ...

La maladie de Kawasaki (MK), décrite pour la première fois en 1961 par Tomisaku Kawasaki (Kawasaki, 1967), est la principale cause des pathologies cardiaques acquises chez les enfants des pays développés. Elle affecte majoritairement le nourrisson et le jeune enfant et sa gravité est liée aux complications cardio-vasculaires et aux graves anomalies...

Résumé : La maladie de Kawasaki (MK), décrite pour la première fois en 1961 par Tomisaku Kawasaki (Kawasaki, 1967), est la principale cause des pathologies cardiaques acquises chez les enfants des pays développés. Elle affecte majoritairement le nourrisson et le jeune enfant et sa gravité est liée aux complications cardio-vasculaires et aux graves...

Seasonal patterns in cholera dynamics exhibit pronounced variability across geographical regions, showing single or multiple peaks at different times of the year. Although multiple hypotheses related to local climate variables have been proposed, an understanding of this seasonal variation remains incomplete. The historical Bengal region, which enc...

Atmospheric concentrations of the two main greenhouse gases (GHGs), carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), are continuously measured since November 2012 at the Spanish rural station of Gredos (GIC3), within the climate network ClimaDat, together with atmospheric radon (²²²Rn) tracer and meteorological parameters. The atmospheric variability of CH4...

Introduction: Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute self-limited systemic vasculitis relatively common in childhood. The etiology of KD is still unknown, although clinical, laboratory and epidemiological features suggest an infectious origin or trigger. Differences on incidence between countries have been related to specific genetic factors, ethnicity...

Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute self-limited systemic vasculitis relatively common in childhood. The etiology of KD is still unknown, although clinical, laboratory and epidemiological features suggest an infectious origin or trigger. Differences on incidence between countries have been related to specific genetic factors, ethnicity, country of bi...

The subsurface heat buildup in the western tropical Pacific and the recharge phase in equatorial heat content are intrinsic elements of El Niño-Southern Oscillation, leading to changes in zonal wind stress, sea surface temperature and thermocline tilt that characterize the growing and mature phases of El Niño (EN) events. Here we use numerical simu...

Background: El Niño and its effect on local meteorological conditions potentially influences interannual variability in dengue transmission in southern coastal Ecuador. El Oro province is a key dengue surveillance site, due to the high burden of dengue, seasonal transmission, co-circulation of all four dengue serotypes, and the recent introduction...

A substantial body of work supports a teleconnection between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and cholera incidence in Bangladesh. In particular, high positive anomalies during the winter (Dec-Feb) in sea surface temperatures (SST) in the tropical Pacific have been shown to exacerbate the seasonal outbreak of cholera following the monsoons f...

Deviation from climatological June rainfall for (A) five high flooding years, (B) five low flooding years, and (C) 2016. Units are (mm/d). (PDF)

Precipitation in Dhaka for the months June and July. The dotted gray line corresponds to the average precipitation during Jun–Jul for the period 2007–2015. (PDF)

Water level in Dhaka. (A) Tide level from Demra, a gage station located at 23.7232 N, 90.5018 E (in the eastern part of Dhaka). (B) Tide level from Mirpur, a second gage station located at 23.7833 N, 90.3385 E (in the western part of Dhaka). The dotted lines correspond to the flooding threshold for each station (5.75m for Demra and 5.94m for Mirpur...

Comparison of simulated and predicted monthly cases with those reported for the whole city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The normalized cases from the core and periphery of the city are shown in black. The median of 1000 simulations is shown in dark yellow, with the 10–90% confidence intervals (C.I.) in the shaded lighter color. The background shading rect...

(A) The six periodic splines considered in the seasonality component of the transmission rate. The fourth and fifth splines were used to incorporate the effect of ENSO (thicker lines). (B) Functional form of ENSO, estimated with the parameters from the MLE (red) and its confidence interval (gray shaded area). (C) Transmission rate by month. The exp...

Epidemiological parameter estimates and confidence intervals. (DOCX)

Model equations, parameter estimation, and prediction evaluation. (DOCX)

Comparison between the evolution of (A) seasonality and (B) long-term variability (periods > 2 years) for rainfall (blue) and high tide level (black) at Mirpur station in Dhaka. Rainfall amounts and high tide level measures were both accumulated and a linear trend was removed by least squares estimation. Individual oscillatory components were ortho...

El Niño (EN) is a dominant feature of climate variability on inter-annual time scales driving changes in the climate throughout the globe, and having wide-spread natural and socio-economic consequences. In this sense, its forecast is an important task, and predictions are issued on a regular basis by a wide array of prediction schemes and climate c...

Deltas provide many worthy ecosystem services. Yet, delta basins are quite vulnerable, especially in the face of climate change, which can affect the outcome of both agriculture and biodiversity. Moreover, rice paddy cultivation is well known to contribute with strong emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as methane (CH4). Thus, knowing the at...

Despite extensive ongoing efforts on improving the long-term prediction of El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the predictability in state-of-the-art operational schemes remains limited by factors such as the spring barrier and the influence of atmospheric winds. Recent research suggests that the 2014/15 El Niño (EN) event was stalled as a result of an u...