When we think about how to solve human health problems, we mostly talk about individuals and their behavior.
We think that if we can control how a person eats, drinks, and exercises — and if we can give them drugs to fight off infections — that person will live a long and healthy life. But that misguided idea overlooks an uncomfortable truth.
The environment that people live in has a huge impact on human health, and we ignore that reality at our own peril, notes a recent report published by a commission organized by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet.
The commission argues that an individual-centric view of what causes disease is incomplete and neglects the fact that everything from the food we eat to the illnesses we are exposed to is determined by the environment around us. We need to start talking about health in a way that considers the planet we fundamentally depend on.
At a discussion of the newly released report on July 16, Dr. Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained that if we don't start to value the fact that we are in a symbiotic relationship with our planet, we could soon end up in a catastrophic situation.
The report argues that we need to start redefining health discussions in the context of "planetary health."
A changing planet
As the human population has grown, we've started to completely transform the very face of the Earth; some of those changes could greatly increase disease and cut human lifespans short.
We've built cities that continue to get bigger, used up more and more land for agriculture to support growing populations, cut down forests in order to carve out space for humanity, polluted lakes and streams and rivers, captured ever increasing numbers of fish, and released more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
People talk about how poor air quality can cause respiratory illness, but we talk less about the ways that urbanization and globalization are creating other very real health risks. Airborne diseases spread more easily in densely populated areas. As wild environments are destroyed, people are exposed to more and more animal diseases that could potentially jump species — like Ebola and HIV both did.
Crimes against animals could also help spark a pandemic. Steven Osofsky, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, pointed out that the poaching and wildlife trade is the second-largest international criminal industry on the planet — animal trafficking takes species from all over the globe and moves them to wherever there's money to be made from them.
"If you are a virus" carried by one of these species and looking for a new host, he says, "you just won the lottery."
Environmental problems are health problems
Along with the new planetary health report, researchers earlier this month published a study in The Lancet detailing what will happen if the populations of pollinators like honeybees continue to collapse, a problem many have attributed to pesticide use. Shrinking honeybee populations could jeopardize our ability to cultivate a wide variety of crops.
According to the findings in The Lancet, ongoing colony collapse could mean another 71 million people becoming vitamin A deficient — which can lead to blindness. An additional 2.2 billion people, who already consume less vitamin A than they should, would risk getting even less of it. Another 173 million people would become deficient in folate, which can lead to severe birth defects. Global supplies of fruits, vegetables, and nuts would be decreased by 22.9%, 16.3%, and 22.1%, respectively, which could all increase global deaths from malnutrition and the rates of illnesses like heart disease and cancer.
Pollinator collapse is not just an environmental concern; it's a human health issue.
From this view, most "environmental" problems really are human health issues.
Take African elephants, whose populations are being devastated by poachers who kill them for their ivory tusks. They aren't just majestic, highly intelligent creatures — the Congo rainforest has also evolved in ways that make it dependent on them. Many trees need to have their seeds literally pass through an elephant's gut before they can germinate. That rainforest, along with the Amazon, could be considered one of the two "lungs of the planet," according to Osofsky — one of the places most essential for converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. If we lose elephants, we risk crippling one of those planetary lungs.
The world has been able to accomplish tremendous things that have greatly extended human life over the past 150 years or so, but "we may have mortgaged the future in order to sustain our current level of health and development," explained Sir Andy Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the chair of the commission that wrote the report.
Going forward, we need to take the health of the planet into account if we want to protect those gains.
