SYMPOSIUM | November 13 – 17, 2016, Shangri-La Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand
Environmental health: Inter-linkages among the Environment, Chemicals and Infectious Agents
GLOBAL HEALTH GROUP INTERNATIONAL was invited at the UNEP-WHO roundtable “Emerging Environment and Health Linkages in Asia”. During the meeting GHGI position was to emphasise that Rural societies are the de facto stewards of much, if not most, of the world’s ‘biodiversity’. Their livelihoods and health are directly dependent on the biodiversity in their immediate surroundings. Also, the rural environments in which these stakeholders live are changing more rapidly than any other lands with, in particular, a trend toward agriculture intensification dictated by globalization and an increasing use of agro-chemicals in crop production and pharmaceuticals in industrial livestock operations. Environmental contamination with agro-chemicals and pharmaceuticals together with the livelihood shifts and natural habitat fragmentation associated with agriculture intensification has both direct and indirect health consequences, including increases in the prevalence, severity, or distribution of infectious diseases in nature through complex mechanisms involving the depletion of biodiversity (including local genetic resources), ecological cycles disruption and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance in pathogenic soil microorganisms.
Increasing evidence suggests that these challenges and issues emerge from the lack of a comprehensive framework that encompasses rural communities cultural perspectives and environmental circumstances that impede community resilience. This presentation provides and discusses elements underlying a needed conceptual reframing accounting for these unacknowledged realities and related gaps in research and practice focusing on the linkages between health and biodiversity.
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