Conservation medicine: combining the best of all worlds - Focus

Environmental Health Perspectives, August, 2003 by Bob Weinhold

Awards for another competition that adds economic development issues to the human-wildlife-environment mix are expected to be announced in the fall of 2003, Rosenthal says. Planning grants of a little under $1 million, funded largely by the NIH with some potential contributions from the NSF and the USGS, will be converted into research grants following another competition in about two years.

The USGS has paid more attention to conservation medicine issues in the past few years, says Dein, although the concept is still not well-recognized. General interest was heightened by the onset and rapid spread in the United States of West Nile virus, which has been documented in about 85% of the states and now infects people as well as about 230 bird, mammal, and reptile species.

There is no line item in the USGS fiscal year 2004 budget for conservation medicine, Dein says, but programs such as the new Wildlife Disease Information Node--part of the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure--can be considered to fall under the conservation medicine umbrella. The information node is an online national tracking system for problems such as harmful algal blooms and chronic wasting disease (an animal disease suspected of being able to cross to humans), for most of which there have been few national data.

In another effort, the USGS is beginning to look at wildlife disease sentinels, a topic also being pursued by Aguirre. He is investigating species such as manatees, dolphins, oysters, and clams to see if factors that affect their health can accurately be extrapolated to predict human health impacts.

Private veterinary hospitals also can play a role in building the database by collecting and reporting data on animal diseases, says Jonathan Sleeman, director of veterinary services at the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro. However, in order to make the data credible, he acknowledges that the data gatherers will need to adopt standardized practices.

At the university level, interested professionals have developed curricula at institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Canada's University of Western Ontario. Harvard has even exported the contents of one class, Global Environmental Change and Human Health, to 44 other medical schools, colleges, and universities, and made it available free on its website, says Eric Chivian, director of the Harvard Medical School Canter for Health and the Global Environment. Jonathan Patz, director of the Program on Health Effects of Global Environmental Change at Johns Hopkins, says that school, in partnership with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, also hopes to begin a special Ph.D. training track in global environmental health this fall.

In addition, numerous conferences held around the world in 2003 by various groups have incorporated conservation medicine-related sessions. At least four have been geared at a wide range of attendees: Natural Science and Human Health: Prescription for a Better Environment (held April 1-3), the International Forum on Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health (held May 18-23), the Chapman Conference on Ecosystem Interactions with Land Use Change (held June 14-18), and the 5th Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community (scheduled for October 16-18). And to reach out to younger generations about conservation medicine, Patz has led an effort to create a Johns Hopkins website directed at middle school children, with sections on climate change, biodiversity, food and water scarcity, and other topics coming online throughout 2003.