F8-165) Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health (Ecohealth) aim to improve community health by focusing on social and ecological interactions in the analysis of health determinants and responses to health problems. The lens of analysis moves to the ecosystem level as a means to strengthen social involvement and intersectoral responses to relevant development problematiques. Projects use ecosystems...

As in many western countries, Denmark’s demographic changes and the organizational and financial changes of the Danish healthcare are challenging the levels of provided healthcare and point towards the establishment of telemedicine as means of patient support, diagnosis, and treatment. However, telemedical solutions, despite the benefits they provide, are faced with a number of challenges that ...

Conservation medicine is an emerging discipline that links human and animal health with ecosystem health and global environmental change. The biosphere is threatened by several pervasive and synergistic phenomena that are the result of increasing human pressures on the planet: climate change, biological impoverishment (loss of biodiversity and ecological processes), emerging infectious diseases...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (A) to describe the challenges of reporting on changes in ecosystem health at landscape scales, and (B) to review the statistical and mathematical techniques that allow the derivation of landscape health assessments from a variety of data consisting of remote sensing imagery, demographic and socioeconomic censuses, natural resource surveys, longterm ecologi...

Ecosystem management via interacting models of political and ecological processes.— The decision to implement environmental protection options is a political one. Political realities may cause a country to not heed the most persuasive scientific analysis of an ecosystem’s future health. A predictive understanding of the political processes that result in ecosystem management decisions may help ...

Contamination by heavy metals has attracted increasing attention considering the ability of these elements in producing serious consequence to ecosystem, and especially on animals health. Due to their widespread use in human activities such as industry, agriculture and even as medicine (e.g. arsenic, selenium and platinum), numerous health risks may be associated with exposure to these substanc...

Among the class of pollutants considered as 'emerging contaminants', antibiotic compounds including drugs used in medical therapy, biocides and disinfectants merit special consideration because their bioactivity in the environment is the result of their functional design. Antibiotics can alter the structure and function of microbial communities in the receiving environment and facilitate the de...