EcoHealth

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.

Ecosystem approaches to health, or ecohealth, emerged as a defined field of inquiry and application in the 1990s, primarily through the global research supported by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa (IDRC), Canada (Lebel, 2003). However, this was a resurrection of an approach to health and ecology that can be traced back, in Western societies, to Hippocrates, and to much earlier eras in Eastern societies. The approach was prominent among many scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries, but fell into disfavour in the twentieth century, when technical professionalism and expertise were assumed to be sufficient to deal with health and disease. In this relatively brief era, evaluation of the negative human health impacts of environmental change (both the natural and built environment) was allotted to the fields of medicine and environmental health. One medicine, as championed by scholars and practitioners such as Calvin Schwabe, was largely considered a marginal activity.

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