From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
Conservation medicine is
an emerging, interdisciplinary
field that studies the
relationship between
human and
animal
health, and
environmental conditions. Also
known as ecological medicine,
environmental medicine, or
medical geology.
The environmental causes of
health problems are complex,
global, and poorly understood.
Conservation medicine
practitioners form
multidisciplinary teams to tackle
these issues. They can include
physicians,
veterinarians,
researchers and
clinicians in many disciplines
including
microbiologists,
pathologists,
landscape analysts,
marine biologists,
toxicologists,
epidemiologists,
climate biologists,
anthropologists,
economists, and
political scientists.
Clinical areas include
HIV,
Lyme disease,
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS),
avian influenza,
West Nile virus,
Nipah virus, and other
emerging
infectious diseases.
The term conservation
medicine was first used in the
mid-1990s,
and represents a significant
paradigm shift in both
medicine and
environmentalism. While the
hands-on process in individual
cases is complicated, the
underlying concept of
interrelationships is quite
intuitive, namely, that all things
are related. The threat of
zoonotic
diseases—cross-species diseases
that travel to humans from other
animal
species—is central. For
example, burning huge areas of
forest (to make way for
farmland) is normally seen as an
environmental (and economic)
concern. That action may displace
a wild animal species, which comes
into contact with and infects a
domesticated animal species,
creating a veterinary problem. The
domesticated animal then enters
the human food chain and infects
people, and a new health threat
appears. Conventional approaches
to environmental protection and
animal and human health only as an
exception examine these
connections, whereas in
conservation medicine, such
relationships are fundamental.
Professionals from the many
disciplines involved, who usually
operate in well-separated spheres,
necessarily work closely together.
Social impact
By looking at the environment
and health as a continuum,
conservation medicine has the
potentional to change public
perspectives on many high profile
societal issues, making the
distant and ill-defined, local and
pressing. For instance,
global warming may have
vaguely defined long-term impacts,
but when an immediate effect is a
relatively slight rise in air
temperature, which in turn
raises the flight ceiling for
temperature-sensitive
mosquitoes, allowing them to
infect higher
flying
birds, and so forth, the issue
becomes more real. Likewise, the
broad topic of
suburban sprawl is made more
relevant when seen in terms of the
immediate imbalance it brings to
rural ecosystems, which leads to
population increases of, and
forces humans into closer contact
with, certain animal populations
(like
rodents), introducing the risk
of hosts of new cross-species
diseases. Seemingly
common sense scenarios like
these lie at the heart of
conservation medicine. When tied
to actual cases (like SARS or
HIV/AIDS), this
holistic outlook seems likely
to resonate more powerfully with
the public than the more abstract
explanations of environmental and
health issues that we are
currently used to.
Resources
-
Environmental Health
Perspectives (EHP) is a
monthly journal of peer-reviewed
research and news on the impact
of the environment on human
health. EHP content is free
online
- Conservation Medicine:
Combining the Best of All
Worlds - August 2003
fulltext
- E-The Environmental
Magazine, November/December
2004.
- Connecting the Dots: The
Emerging Science of
Conservation Medicine Links
Human and Animal Health with
the Environment by Jim
Motavalli. Animal diseases are
crossing over to humans at an
alarming rate, and one of the
major reasons is the wholesale
destruction of the
environment. We all know about
West Nile virus and Lyme
disease, but newly emerging
killers spread by animals,
birds and insects in
compromised ecosystems include
SARS, monkeypox and avian
influenza.
fulltext
- E WORD Conservation Health
by Doug Moss
fulltext
