On 15, 16 and 17 November, international scientists will meet in Barcelona to attend a conference entitled "Climate, populations and new and re-emerging diseases", with the aim to analyse the interrelationship between climate and health. Organized by Xavier Rodó, ICREA research professor and head of the Climate Research Laboratory of the PCB, this series of conferences will be held in the Science Museum "la Caixa".

In this conference, scientists will present information on the co-occurrence of new and old diseases that are emerging worldwide or becoming more serious and not only in developing countries. In this regard, factors such as climatic change, globalisation of public health policies play an important role.

The conference will include presentations on the impact and development of diseases such as malaria, Ebola, or cholera by: Pedro Alonso, professor with the Dept. of Public Health of the University of Barcelona and head of the International Health and Epidemiology Research Group at IDIBAPS, who is developing a vaccine against malaria; Lisa Hensley, researcher at the Infection Disease Medical Research Institute of the North American army; and Mercedes Pascual, expert in epidemiology at the Dept. of Ecology and Evolutional Biology at the University of Michigan, among others.

Furthermore, the conference will include presentations that relate the climatic change with pest epidemics, animal diseases or arboreal viral infections. These will be given by Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo and expert in population dynamics and evolutional biology; Peter Hudson, epidemiologist at the Pennsylvania State University, and Philip Mellor, from the Institute for Animal Health at the Pirbright Laboratory (UK), respectively.

Finally the following topics will be addressed: climatic change at global and regional levels; prediction of climate-sensitive diseases; detection and attribution of effects of climatic change on the incidence of disease or climatic phenomena such as monsoons, heat waves and droughts. These topics will involve experts such as Curt Covey, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA); Filippo Giorgi, researcher at the International Center of Theoretical Physics in Trieste; Francisco Doblas, from the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting (UK); Daíthí Stone, expert in the detection of climatic change from the University of Oxford; James L. Kinter III, head of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmospheres (USA) and Alexander Gershunov, expert in climatic impact at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography (USA), among others.