Wiping out the rain forest can extremely harm animals for instance toucans, golden lion tamarind monkeys and poison dart frogs. Another species that can be added to that list of animals is the social animal; that is humans.

According to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, carrying out deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon can definitely lead to malaria pandemics in the approaching years.

The results are some of the most thorough yet to link environmental modifications with the spread of disease.

The work, which has been published today in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, combined malaria case information with high-resolution satellite imagery from a remote, thinly populated region, belonging to tropical Brazil that is about half the size of Rhode Island.

For every square kilometer of forest threshed away, the number of reported malaria cases increased by no less than 50%, the study found.

The leap in malaria occurrence could be present due to a rise in the populace of mosquitoes that carries the ailment, said Jonathan Patz, a UW-Madison Epidemiologist and Co-author of the study.

In a preceding study, the team demonstrated that the populace of Anopheles darlingi, the species of mosquito that transfers the disease by carrying it everywhere, explodes after deforestation.

One reason for this bang is that Anopheles darlingi flourishes in lagoons with part sunlight. Felling the rain forest canopy creates extra of these sun-flecked puddles for the insects to colonize.