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:
“Fear prophets ... and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping- coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe a cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)