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Summer is allegedly carefree and fun, but a glance at recent Forbes breaking news coverage (and, okay, my own web search history) reveals anything but. We’re looking at parasitic diarrhea illness cyclosporiasis in 31 states, the pneumonia-like Legionnaires’ disease in New York City and an unhealthy air quality index across the country due to wildfires that are blazing in Canada.

None of this is brand new to summer 2026: Cooling towers are breeding grounds for the bacteria that causes Legionnaires; wildfire smoke in 2021 and 2023 turned San Francisco and New York, respectively, positively Martian in hue; small cyclosporiasis clusters occur annually, and in the summer. What is different about right now, however, is the breadth and severity of what we’re seeing—and scientists point to climate change as the exacerbating factor.

“Scientists have formally hypothesized a role for climate change in creating more optimal environmental conditions needed for diseases such as cyclosporiasis to spread,” Forbes healthcare policy contributor Joshua Cohen writes here. “They observe associations between higher temperatures in non-tropical settings and the prevalence of pathogens such as cyclospora [the parasite that causes cyclosporiasis]. Indeed, cyclospora depend on prolonged outdoor heat and moisture to mature, which makes it sensitive to the effects of rising........

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