Issues > March/April 2006 (#113) > Earth Day Tips: Rx for the Planet and Your Health

Earth Day Tips: Rx for the Planet and Your Health

This Earth Day, consider the planet as you do your body: Our health is intimately connected with the world around us. In addition to our need for clean air and drinking water, scientists are discovering new ways that ecosystems affect us. Destruction of natural wildlife habitats, for instance, can lead to humans getting exposed to new diseases.

"What we really need to understand are the implications that activities like deforestation, global travel and trade and agricultural intensification have for the spillover of diseases from wild animals," says Jon Epstein, Ph.D., veterinary epidemiologist with the Consortium for Environmental Medicine at Wildlife Trust. For example, avian flu spreads from wild birds to domestic poultry, from which it can infect humans, as happened in Turkey this January. "In Asia, it's probably about a billion contacts annually between humans and animals, and the chances of diseases like SARs, avian flu and Nipah fever go way up," says William Karesh, D.V.M., director of the field veterinary program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who last summer found the avian flu virus H5N1 in migratory birds in Mongolia. He has also extensively studied Ebola fever, tracing it to "the consumption of wild animals, [which] is creating disease outbreaks and biodiversity loss."

For our own sake, we can act on behalf of the Earth's health and get others involved, at home, office, school and on vacations too. Below are some opportunities for consumers to help protect specific ecosystems and all-over resources, like Earth's atmosphere.

Rain Forests

In addition to the devastation wrought by clear-cutting of trees, new satellite photos show that even selective logging in the Amazon takes a substantial toll, causing 50 to 80 million tons more carbon dioxide (C02) to enter the atmosphere each year, according to Gregory Asner, Ph.D., who works in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. "There's an enormous amount of collateral damage caused in selective logging," Asner says. This includes pollution of watersheds and fragmentation of habitats by logging roads, resulting in more human contacts with such vectors as malaria-bearing mosquitoes or ticks carrying Lyme disease. With "deforestation and loss of clean drinking water, you see outbreaks of disease," Karesh says.

PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  NEXT