Food, Global Environmental Change and Health: EcoHealth to the Rescue?

Everything is changing, and changing rapidly, except how we think. What we eat brings issues of health and global environmental change to the table in ways that are urgent, global, and full of scientific uncertainty. Eating is the most intimate relationship we have with the environment, when various parts of plants and animals are integrated into our bodies. Our eating habits link human nutrition (and all the health issues associated with that) and infectious foodborne diseases to agricultural practices, land use, global trade, poverty, economic inequity and climate change. Official estimates of the incidence of endemic foodborne diseases (as differentiated from outbreaks) from both Canada and the United States show that there were increasing trends from the 1970s to the late 1980s and 1990s. This was the period when Western industrialized countries saw the emergence of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, serious diseases caused by shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, the pandemic of Salmonella enteritidis and the recognition of listeriosis as a foodborne illness. While one can pinpoint specific causal pathways for each of the diseases, they all reflect more general systemic and cultural changes, including population growth and mobility, a huge shift in agriculture to economies of scale and mass distribution, land use changes including manure production by large livestock enterprises, an expectation of low food costs at the grocery store, relatively low oil costs, better detection methods and a more alert public (1,2). The increases of the 1980s might be said to have culminated, at least in the public eye, in the 1993 deaths of four children who succumbed to E. coli 0157:H7 infection after eating hamburgers at a fast food restaurant. While this was not the biggest nor most spectacular outbreak of this disease, it coincided with the election of Bill Clinton to the White House, and a serious reworking of food safety procedures in the United States. This was followed by a drop in rates of foodborne infectious diseases for a few years about the turn of the new millennium, and then a settling in to relatively stable rates. The decreases since the turn of the new millennium are probably the result of food industry sobriety and seriousness in the face of more aggressive government regulation, food recalls, litigation, and a worried public. The relative stabilization of rates in the past few years may well reflect a bottom line, the disease costs built into …