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Biomedical subjects

Jonathan A Patz

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathan A Patz.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Global consequences of land use.

Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas have expanded in recent decades, accompanied by large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along with considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. We face the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.

Agriculture↗
PubMed2004

Global warming.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Environmental Health↗
PubMed2004

Hospital admissions for heart disease: the effects of temperature and humidity.

BACKGROUND: We estimated the effects of temperature and humidity on hospital admissions for heart disease (International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision [ICD-9] codes 390-429) and myocardial infarction (ICD-9 code 410) of persons age 65 and older in 12 U.S. cities with a wide range of climates. To account for possible delayed effects and harvesting, we examined the impact of weather up to 20 days before each admission. METHODS: Poisson regression models were fitted in each city, with regression splines used to control for season and barometric pressure. We also controlled day of the week. We estimated the effect and the lag structure of both temperature and humidity based on a distributed lag model. FINDINGS: For cities in both hot and cold climates, we found that hospital admissions for all heart disease increased monotonically with average temperature on the same day as and the day before admission. The effect of very high temperatures had a temporal pattern consistent with harvesting: several days after an episode of high temperature, there were fewer admissions. In contrast, a protective effect of cold temperature persisted without rebound. The effects of either hot or cold temperature disappeared within 10 days of exposure. There was no evidence for a humidity effect. Similar but smaller effects of temperature were seen for admissions for myocardial infarction specifically. CONCLUSIONS: The effects of temperature on hospital admissions predominantly occur within a few days after exposure, and much of the effect of hot temperatures is short-term displacement of events.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2004

Unhealthy landscapes: Policy recommendations on land use change and infectious disease emergence.

Anthropogenic land use changes drive a range of infectious disease outbreaks and emergence events and modify the transmission of endemic infections. These drivers include agricultural encroachment, deforestation, road construction, dam building, irrigation, wetland modification, mining, the concentration or expansion of urban environments, coastal zone degradation, and other activities. These changes in turn cause a cascade of factors that exacerbate infectious disease emergence, such as forest fragmentation, disease introduction, pollution, poverty, and human migration. The Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence grew out of a special colloquium that convened international experts in infectious diseases, ecology, and environmental health to assess the current state of knowledge and to develop recommendations for addressing these environmental health challenges. The group established a systems model approach and priority lists of infectious diseases affected by ecologic degradation. Policy-relevant levels of the model include specific health risk factors, landscape or habitat change, and institutional (economic and behavioral) levels. The group recommended creating Centers of Excellence in Ecology and Health Research and Training, based at regional universities and/or research institutes with close links to the surrounding communities. The centers' objectives would be 3-fold: a) to provide information to local communities about the links between environmental change and public health; b) to facilitate fully interdisciplinary research from a variety of natural, social, and health sciences and train professionals who can conduct interdisciplinary research; and c) to engage in science-based communication and assessment for policy making toward sustainable health and ecosystems.

Agriculture↗
PubMed2003

Predictability of Vibrio cholerae in Chesapeake Bay.

Vibrio cholerae is autochthonous to natural waters and can pose a health risk when it is consumed via untreated water or contaminated shellfish. The correlation between the occurrence of V. cholerae in Chesapeake Bay and environmental factors was investigated over a 3-year period. Water and plankton samples were collected monthly from five shore sampling sites in northern Chesapeake Bay (January 1998 to February 2000) and from research cruise stations on a north-south transect (summers of 1999 and 2000). Enrichment was used to detect culturable V. cholerae, and 21.1% (n = 427) of the samples were positive. As determined by serology tests, the isolates, did not belong to serogroup O1 or O139 associated with cholera epidemics. A direct fluorescent-antibody assay was used to detect V. cholerae O1, and 23.8% (n = 412) of the samples were positive. V. cholerae was more frequently detected during the warmer months and in northern Chesapeake Bay, where the salinity is lower. Statistical models successfully predicted the presence of V. cholerae as a function of water temperature and salinity. Temperatures above 19 degrees C and salinities between 2 and 14 ppt yielded at least a fourfold increase in the number of detectable V. cholerae. The results suggest that salinity variation in Chesapeake Bay or other parameters associated with Susquehanna River inflow contribute to the variability in the occurrence of V. cholerae and that salinity is a useful indicator. Under scenarios of global climate change, increased climate variability, accompanied by higher stream flow rates and warmer temperatures, could favor conditions that increase the occurrence of V. cholerae in Chesapeake Bay.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Satellite imagery characterizes local animal reservoir populations of Sin Nombre virus in the southwestern United States.

The relationship between the risk of hantaviral pulmonary syndrome (HPS), as estimated from satellite imagery, and local rodent populations was examined. HPS risk, predicted before rodent sampling, was highly associated with the abundance of Peromyscus maniculatus, the reservoir of Sin Nombre virus (SNV). P. maniculatus were common in high-risk sites, and populations in high-risk areas were skewed toward adult males, the subclass most frequently infected with SNV. In the year after an El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), captures of P. maniculatus increased only in high-risk areas. During 1998, few sites had infected mice, but by 1999, 1820 of the high-risk sites contained infected mice and the crude prevalence was 30.8%. Only 118 of the low-risk sites contained infected rodents, and the prevalence of infection was lower (8.3%). Satellite imagery identified environmental features associated with SNV transmission within its reservoir population, but at least 2 years of high-risk conditions were needed for SNV to reach high prevalence. Areas with persistently high-risk environmental conditions may serve as refugia for the survival of SNV in local mouse populations.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Temperature and mortality in 11 cities of the eastern United States.

Episodes of extremely hot or cold temperatures are associated with increased mortality. Time-series analyses show an association between temperature and mortality across a range of less extreme temperatures. In this paper, the authors describe the temperature-mortality association for 11 large eastern US cities in 1973-1994 by estimating the relative risks of mortality using log-linear regression analysis for time-series data and by exploring city characteristics associated with variations in this temperature-mortality relation. Current and recent days' temperatures were the weather components most strongly predictive of mortality, and mortality risk generally decreased as temperature increased from the coldest days to a certain threshold temperature, which varied by latitude, above which mortality risk increased as temperature increased. The authors also found a strong association of the temperature-mortality relation with latitude, with a greater effect of colder temperatures on mortality risk in more-southern cities and of warmer temperatures in more-northern cities. The percentage of households with air conditioners in the south and heaters in the north, which serve as indicators of socioeconomic status of the city population, also predicted weather-related mortality. The model developed in this analysis is potentially useful for projecting the consequences of climate-change scenarios and offering insights into susceptibility to the adverse effects of weather.

Climate↗
PubMed2002

Reactive nitrogen and human health: acute and long-term implications.

Reactive-nitrogen (Nr) has a wide variety of beneficial and detrimental effects on human health. The most important of the beneficial effects are increasing global and regional food supplies and increased nutritional quality of available foods. However, lack of adequate dietary intake of amino acids and proteins is a serious cause of malnutrition when food supplies are inadequate because of poverty, drought, floods, wars, and displacements of people as refugees. There is sufficient, though limited, quantitative data indicating that increased circulation of Nr in the environment is responsible for significant human health effects via other exposure pathways. Nr can lead to harmful health effects from airborne occupational exposures and population-wide indoor and outdoor air pollution exposures to nitrogen dioxide and ozone. Nr can also affect health via water pollution problems, including methemoglobinemia from contaminated ground water, eutrophication causing fish kills and algal blooms that can be toxic to humans, and via global warming. The environmental pollutants stemming from reactive nitrogen are ubiquitous, making it difficult to identify the extent to which Nr exerts a specific health effect. As all populations are susceptible, continued interdisciplinary investigations are needed to determine the extent and nature of the beneficial and harmful effects on human health of nitrogen-related pollutants and their derivatives.

Animals↗