non - infectious diseases ?

Disease ecology takes into consideration a broad spectrum of factors comprising the tapestry of a human being's day-today life experience. A disease ecology perspective is one that places human health within the context of a human being's interactions within a wide array of environments. These include the physical environment that surrounds us as well as the social and cultural environments all humans are influenced by and participate in. If we were to think of each of these environments as vast planes, then the life of a human being can be represented by the line formed at the simultaneous intersection of these environmental planes. With this image, we are able to better illustrate the idea that a human's state of health and well being is determined by the collective influence of all environments he or she is a part of. Thus, no one environment can be singled out and no one neglected if we are to paint a fair and balanced picture of health and disease propagation. Environmental influences do not solely determine health. One must not forget that humans have agency and personal responsibility in their health outcomes. The disease ecology perspective emphasizes the role that human behavior plays in continually shaping environmental conditions which in turn affect human health, for better or for worse. For example, human behavior is responsible for technological interventions into the physical environment, allowing for the continued growth and persistence of human civilization in even the harshest of climates. But, on the other hand, these same technological interventions have allowed for the creation of unsanitary and overcrowded urban environments that have multiplied disease prevalence. Another example is the health of populations in sub-Saharan Africa where masses of displaced people are continually forced to migrate into sparsely inhabited areas as a result of war and strife. These migratory populations are besieged by increasingly virulent outbreaks of malaria and trypanosomiasis from their exposure to disease from remote animal population reservoirs spread by large mosquito and tsetse fly populations serving as vectors for new disease strains for which the human populations possess no natural or inherited immunity. Older disease ecology models that focus primarily on human-habitat interactions are quite successful in understanding how phenomena such as human migrations into remote landscapes and overcrowding in poorly-sanitized urban settings spread disease. These earlier disease ecology perspectives focused primarily on explaining the rise, fall, and distribution of infectious diseases such as …