Hacia una historia ambiental de la salud: Elementos para un programa de trabajo

• Autores: Guillermo Castro Herrera
• Localización: Theomai: estudios sobre sociedad, naturaleza y desarrollo, ISSN-e 1515-6443, Nº. 6, 2002
• Idioma: español
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (htm)
• Resumen

  • The environment has become an issue of increasing importance for contemporary public health studies and debate. This has already meant going beyond the traditional emphasis on water provision, sanitation and waste disposal, to include the general consequences for health of the interactions between the environment and development in the context of globalization, from emerging and reemerging diseases associated with climate change, to massive urbanization, increasing social inequality and deterioration of natural resources worldwide. Considering illness and death as natural factors, and health as a social creation obtained and preserved by humans through the production of environments of their own, it becomes evident the importance of an environmental history approach for the adequate comprehension of the links between all of them. This demands the development of a research program with three main objectives: to get to know in a much more detailed way historical experiences of interaction between societies, their human environments, and the health of their populations, mostly through a series of well defined and coordinated case studies; to comprehend the most characteristic phenomena present in the historical development of such processes, and to identify and analyze the problems and opportunities present in those interactions in the context of globalization.