Human ecology and public health

Understanding patterns of health and disease requires that the focus in public health is not only on personal behaviours, biologic traits and specific risks but also on characteristics of the social and physical environments that shape human experience. At the end of the 20th century a challenge of the dominance of biomedicine and the need to give greater emphasis to the ecological context in the study of human health and disease was growing.1,2,3 The emerging new paradigm of public health … Correspondence: Stanislaw Tarkowski, School of Public Health, Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, Sw. Teresy 8, 91-348 Lodz, Poland, e-mail: tarko{at}imp.lodz.pl