Eco Health
EcoHealth is an emerging field of study researching how changes in the earth’s ecosystems affect human health. It has many prospects. EcoHealth examines changes in the biological, physical, social and economic environments and relates these changes to human health. Examples of these changes and their effects abound. Common examples include increases in asthma rates due to air pollution, PCB contamination of game fish in the Great Lakes of the United States, and habitat fragmentation leading to increasing rates of Lyme disease.
Recently virulent new infectious diseases such as SARS, Ebola virus, Nipah virus, bird flu and hantavirus have all been found to result from ecosystem change created by humans. These diseases have high death rates and very few effective therapies.
EcoHealth is bringing together physicians, veterinarians, ecologists, economists, social scientists, planners and others to study and understand how ecosystem changes affect human health. EcoHealth strives to provide innovative, practical solutions to reduce or reverse the negative health effects of ecosystem change.
Read more about Eco Health: History, How Is EcoHealth Different?, Examples, EcoHealth 101: Education For Ecosystem Approaches, Journals, Books and Papers, Organizations, Conferences, Businesses
Famous quotes containing the words eco and/or health:
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)