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STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Europe could face an increase in outbreaks of diseases carried by insects and rodents as the climate on the continent becomes hotter and wetter, EU health experts said.

"These diseases are closely linked to climate change … We need to address this risk," Renaud Lancelot of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) told reporters in Stockholm Thursday.

Lancelot was one of 23 health experts from across Europe attending a two-day European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) meeting on the heightened risk of so-called vector-borne diseases, or illnesses carried by mosquitoes, sand-flies, ticks and rodents.

"The climate and environmental changes being predicted by experts will alter the risk to Europe from vector-borne diseases," ECDC head Zsuzsanna Jakab said in a statement.

"We are likely to see the spread of diseases such as tick-borne encephalitis, or even chikungunya fever, to places where they have not been seen before," she added.

In addition to climate change, the European Union agency also said the risk of such vector-borne diseases, which affect millions of people worldwide each year, was growing due to "globalisation and the increased travel and trade that it brings."

An example of the increased threat was seen last year, when a traveller who had been infected in India with chikungunya fever was bitten in northern Italy by a type of mosquito that can carry the disease and that recently arrived in Europe.

Nearly 250 people subsequently came down with the illness in what some experts said could be the first such outbreak outside the tropics.

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