Global Environmental Change as “Risk Factor”: Can Epidemiology Cope?

Design: How Can We Cope with Change?

"Some technologies are indeed making the world a riskier place . . . as innovations that can scupper the best laid business plans." The Economist, Jan 24, 2004 "Living Dangerously" p. 3 The gap between the exponential growth of technology, and the slow process of it's understanding and proper adaption to human and business benefit, is analyzed. Present day developments are compared with the rec...

When can risk-factor epidemiology provide reliable tests?

Can we obtain interesting and valuable knowledge from observed associations of the sort described by Greenland and colleagues in their paper on risk factor epidemiology? Greenland argues “yes,” and we agree. However, the really important and difficult questions are when and why. Answering these questions demands a clear understanding of the problems involved when going from observed association...

Revealing hidden evolutionary capacity to cope with global change.

The extent to which global change will impact the long-term persistence of species depends on their evolutionary potential to adapt to future conditions. While the number of studies that estimate the standing levels of adaptive genetic variation in populations under predicted global change scenarios is growing all the time, few studies have considered multiple environments simultaneously and ev...

Global environmental change and human population health: a conceptual and scientific challenge for epidemiology.

A large and rapidly growing human population, resource intensive industrial practices, and land exhausting agriculture has overloaded the carrying capacity of the planet's natural systems. Evidence of overloading include global warming, soil degradation and topsoil loss, decreasing stratospheric ozone, depletion of groundwater, reduced genetic and ecosystem diversity, and acidification of wate...

Environmental epidemiology: An introduction