Health ecology
Health ecology is an emerging field that studies the impact of ecosystems on human health. It examines alterations in the biological, physical, social, and economic environments to understand how these changes affect mental and physical human health. Health ecology focuses on a transdisciplinary approach to understanding all the factors which influence an individual's physiological, social, and emotional well-being.
Eco-health studies often involve environmental pollution. Some examples include an increase in asthma rates due to air pollution, or PCB contamination of game fish in the Great Lakes of the United States. However, health ecology is not necessarily tied to environmental pollution. For example, research has shown that habitat fragmentation is the main factor that contributes to increased rates of Lyme disease in human populations.
History
approaches to public health emerged as a defined field of inquiry and application in the 1990s, primarily through global research supported by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada. However, this was a resurrection of an approach to health and ecology traced back to Hippocrates in Western societies. It can also be traced back to earlier eras in Eastern societies. The approach was also popular among scientists in the centuries. However, it fell out of common practice in the twentieth century, when technical professionalism and expertise were assumed sufficient to manage health and disease. In this relatively brief era, evaluating the adverse impacts of environmental change on human health was assigned to medicine and environmental health.Integrated approaches to health and ecology re-emerged in the 20th century. These revolutionary movements were built on a foundation laid by earlier scholars, including Hippocrates, Rudolf Virchow, and Louis Pasteur. In the 20th century, Calvin Schwabe coined the term "one medicine," recognizing that human and veterinary medicine share similar biological principles, and are interrelated. This one medicine approach, which had fairly clinical and individualistic connotations, was rebranded to "One Health," to reflect its goals of global human and animal health. Other integrated health approaches include ecological resilience, ecological integrity, and healthy communities.
Eco-health approaches, as currently practiced, are participatory, systems-based approaches to understanding and promoting public health and well-being in the context of social and ecological interactions. These approaches are differentiated from previous public health approaches by a firm grounding in complexity theory and post-normal science.
After a decade of international conferences in North America and Australia under the more contentious umbrella of "ecosystem health," the first "ecosystem approach to human health" forum was held in Montreal in 2003, followed by conferences and forums in Wisconsin, U.S., and Mérida, Mexico, all with major support from the IDRC. Since then, the International Association for Ecology and Health, and the journal Eco Health, have established the field as a legitimate scholarly and development activity.