Linking Human Health to Biological Diversity

The challenge facing professionals working in protected areas is to find ways of demonstrating that the conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable use have a fundamental relevance to the daily lives of people, including those who may never visit a protected area. There is a need to emphasize that protected areas contribute to the quality of life. Biodiversity and Human Health concludes that “More than any other biodiversity-related issue, public health concerns can help restore the need for sound management of the world’s biological diversity as an important societal goal.” This pioneering book resulted from a 1995 conference with the same title, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Smithsonian Foundation, the National Association of Physicians for the Environment (NAPE), and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and held at the Smithsonian Foundation. The conference was attended by 250 registrants from the fields of agriculture, biotechnology, chemistry, ecology, epidemiology, ethnobotany, immunology, law and systematics, as well as by physicians, policymakers, and citizens, to open a dialogue on the significance of biodiversity to human health. The editors (respectively from the American Museum of Natural History and the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health) manage to achieve, with the other 26 contributors and the 20 pieces that make up the four parts of the book, their two aims: (1) to “offer examples of the kinds of cross-disciplinary research necessary to better understand and solve the biodiversity/human health crisis” and (2) to “educate and empower the public to both bring these issues to the attention of policymakers and consider the consequences of all their actions on our life-support system.” The book makes a clear link between some causes of biodiversity loss and its disastrous consequences to human health (Part I) and the pharmaceutical importance of biodiversity as a genetic bank for known and new drugs (Part II) in both a medical and an economic perspective. Part III focuses on the relationships between indigenous peoples and the diverse species for which they have been users and stewards, emphasizing that along with the biodiversity loss goes the loss among indigenous peoples of their cultural and scientific traditions. It also considers the compensation of local and indigenous peoples for their contribution to remedies and therapies as an incentive for conservation. The last part links conservation of biodiversity to sustainable development, arguing that “bioprospecting might offer compensation to source countries and serve as an incentive for biodiversity conservation” and exploring different possibilities for collaboration between the medical and the conservation communities. Unfortunately, the book stresses what might be called the “disaster remedy approach”: negative concepts, such as famines, scarcity, deforestation, and losses in biological and cultural diversities, are abundant. Despite the title, there is no actual reference to health; on the contrary, the term health frequently implies numerous forms of diseases. The official definition of health, coined in 1948 by the World Health Organisation and officially accepted by some 185 countries—“health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”—is neglected. Given this definition of health it would be both sensible and timely for professionals to shift the emphasis from a disaster remedy to a “well-being promotion” approach. Nevertheless, the examples used in the book, drawn from several developed and developing countries and illustrated with graphs, charts, tables, and schemes, make the reading informative and pleasant.