Heat Stress: A Global Concern

Alissa Piekarski*, Walter Bottje and Sami Dridi

Heat Stress: A Global Concern.

The agriculture industry provides consumers with food and contributes significantly to the global economy. Due to reliance on specific climate conditions, heat stress can have a very detrimental
effect on this industry for both producers and consumers alike. With heat wave frequency and
intensity projected to rise during the next century, climate change could make it more difficult
to grow crops, raise animals, and harvest fish in the same manner and locations as used in the
past.

Over time, heat stress can increase vulnerability to disease by increasing gut leakage, parasite infestation, reducing milk production, reducing fertility, and lowering birth weights with greater embryonic mortality in livestock. Heat stress also reduces productivity in poultry by increasing numbers of smaller eggs with thinner eggshells that break during handling and processing, and increasing mortality in embryos and neonates as well as lowering growth and productivity. Because of this, finding ways to help poultry and livestock better adapt to climate change is of uppermost importance.

Modern poultry, especially meat producing poultry, are particularly sensitive to heat stress due in part to higher normal body temperatures compared to mammals. Because heat production is a natural occurrence and because these animals have highly metabolically active tissue, poultry suffer from heat stress easily with some succumbing to spiraling hyperthermia due to the inability to regulate body temperature in extreme high temperatures. Therefore, much research has gone into finding a way to alleviate or combat heat stress in these animals.

Adv Food Technol Nutr Sci Open J. 2015;1(5): 102-103. doi: 10.17140/AFTNSOJ-1-118

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