EcoHealth Students

Health and the environment are on the top of Canadian's priority. These two are strongly related: the challenges we are facing to insure healthy living conditions for people and animals and a healthy environment are highly complex and cannot be addressed by one scientific domain alone.

In response to this complexity, ecosystem approaches to health (called EcoHealth for short) have been developed by scientists and practitioners from the social, natural and health fields in Canada and abroad. Ecohealth has already led to many successful research projects and interventions and there is now a need for Canadian researchers and practitioners to come together and share their experience and expertise.

To address this need, three major Canadian Universities - University of British Columbia, University of Guelph, Université du Québec à Montréal - have come together and created a "Canadian community of practice in ecosystem approaches to health (CoPEH-Can)" with the financial support of the International Development Research Center (IDRC). This Community of practice aims at creating a forum for exchange and collaboration between a network of researchers and practitioners from a broad range of disciplines who share an interest with Ecohealth approaches.

By fostering collaboration, the CoPEH-Can hopes to consolidate and extend the Ecohealth approach and to ensure that a new generation of scientists and practitioners will start their careers with the tools necessary to understand the complex interactions between health, social behaviour, and the environment. Scholarships were given to students throughout Canada to attend an 11-day, first annual course on Ecosystem approaches to health hosted at UBC from August 6th to 15th.  Professionals from relevant fields were also invited to attend the course.

At the end of this short course the CoPEH-Can held an official launch that featured a general a presentation of the CoPEH-Can and of its activities. The ceremony was held on the 15th of August at the UBC farm.

For more information go to http://www.copeh-canada.org/index_en.php

(Kirk Smith) Satellite images of sea-ice movement in the Arctic basin suggest that huge quantities of multi-year sea ice have been flushed out of the basin in the last six months. The video clip available at this link is a low-resolution reproduction of a sequence of satellite images of Arctic ice. The sequence runs in a continuous loop from October 01, 2007, to March 15, 2008.

(BBC) This year could see the biggest "dead zone" since records began form in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say conditions are right for the zone to exceed last summer's 6,662 sq miles (17,255 sq km).  The dead zone is an area of water virtually devoid of oxygen which cannot support marine life.  It is caused by nutrients such as fertilisers flowing into the Gulf, stimulating the growth of algae which absorbs the available oxygen.  Read more. 

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Hundreds of foreclosed homes are raising concerns about a potential public health issue because their abandoned pools can be a nesting ground for mosquitoes. One Silicon Valley county is taking a high-tech approach to the problem.  Read more.

(Anita Weier, The Capital Times) 

A study by Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia modeled the effects of biofuel production on nutrient pollution in an aquatic system.

They looked at the estimated amounts of land and fertilizer needed to meet a U.S. Senate production target of 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, more than three times the amount of ethanol produced in 2006.

If that goal is reached, the researchers say nitrogen loading from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico would increase by 10 to 19 percent.

As a result, they predict that nitrogen levels would rise to twice their recommended levels, leading to an expansion of the oxygen-starved dead zone that cannot support life -- an area already equal to the size of New Jersey.

Link to the story here

(Gus Speth, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies)  As Congress prepares to debate new legislation to address the threat of climate change, opponents again claim that the costs of adopting the leading proposals would be ruinous to the U.S. economy. The world's leading economists who have studied the issue say that's wrong. And you can find out for yourself.  Today, Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies posted a new website developed by economics professor Robert Repetto. In a way that anybody can easily understand, it synthesizes the results of thousands of policy simulations from 25 economic models being used to predict the economic impacts of reducing U.S. carbon emissions. To try this new website, just click on http://www.climate.yale.edu/seeforyourself.

(Nature News: Michael Hopkin) The world's health watchdogs are looking in the wrong places for the next dangerous epidemics, according to an analysis of global trends in emerging disease outbreaks over the past few decades.  The study gives a fresh perspective on global disease by tracking the history, from 1940 to 2004, of the emergence and spread of 335 infectious diseases. The extensive work helps to quantify the effect of well-known risk factors, such as population density, on the probability of a disease taking hold in a given area.

Visit the Nature news article here.