ECOHEALTH Research in Practice

Innovative Applications of an Ecosystem Approach to Health

Dominique F. Charron, Editor
International Development Research Centre, 2012
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

“….The ultimate objective of ecohealth research and practice is to
develop environmentally sustainable, community-based interventions
to improve the health of affected communities. Much success has
resulted from the incorporation of community transformation and
empowerment as key project objectives. In some cases, the
participation of government health services has guided the design of
interventions suitable for adoption by health programs. However,
besides the relatively successful examples of six projects (in Ecuador,
Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, and Tanzania) presented in this book,
project outcomes often have limited direct influence on transforming
health programs and even more limited influence on health policy.


In this book, the inclusion of projects with variable influence on health
policy offers the opportunity to examine both the suitability and scope
of the proposed interventions and the nature of the external factors that
influence their adoption by health services….”

Disponible a texto completo desde aquí

Imagen obtenida en: EastBay Eco-Health Network

Sustainable Lifestyles: today’s facts & tomorrow’s trends

SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050

Julia Backhaus, Sylvia Breukers, Oksana Mont, Mia Paukovic, Ruth Mourik

UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption
and Production (CSCP)

Wuppertal. Germany – 2012

“……….a synthesis of research, leading policy and practice, and stakeholder views
on potential pathways toward sustainable lifestyles. The purpose of this report is
to provide the necessary background information to support the SPREAD social
platform participants in creating a holistic vision of sustainable lifestyles in 2050
and recommendations for a plan of action.

Because of the significance of housing, transport, food, health and society, this report
focuses on these key domains. It aims to better understand the relationships
between lifestyles, the conditions that frame those lifestyles, and the resulting
sustainability impacts in Europe today and into the future. In addition, it identifies
promising practices from across Europe that have the potential to be examples of
sustainable ways of living of the future. Existing visions, scenarios

and roadmaps for more sustainable futures – from policy, research, business and
civil society perspectives – are also examined in detail.



“…..· What makes a lifestyle sustainable?

· How to make sustainable lifestyles mainstream?

· How can we encourage positive trends to ensure a better future usage of our
scarce natural resource base (including energy)?

The report delivers concrete examples of initiatives, such as the increase of solar
water heaters (to 75% on Malta), car and bike-sharing initiatives, local food chains,
urban farming, eco-villages and travel agencies offering stay-cations. The report
also shows how these initiatives can benefit increased health and wellbeing and
highlights key elements in order to mainstream and upscale current examples of
sustainable lifestyles.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution as to how to motivate people to behave and
live more healthy and sustainable. Successful initiatives are those that try to
understand how to motivate and enable behavioural change among different
groups of people. It is also important to make sustainable lifestyles easy,
convenient, accessible and enjoyable. This requires the development of
appropriate infrastructure (e.g. to encourage walking and cycling) and context-
specific solutions (e.g, communal rental bikes in Paris, Barcelona, London)……….”

Main themes in this report

1. Unsustainable lifestyle trends in Europe: Food, housing and mobility as
    sustainability hot spots

2. Trends toward sustainability: Promising practices and social innovation

3. Influencing behaviours: Understanding diversity, context-dependency and
    enabling change

4. Enabling environments: Infrastructure, innovation and multi-level,
    multistakeholder change processes

5. Policy solutions: Fostering prosperity and healthy, sustainable ways of living

DISPONIBLE A TEXTO COMPLETO DESDE AQUÍ

Imagen obtenida en: Empowerment Institutte: sustainable lifestyles campaign

Ethical tensions in dealing with noncommunicable diseases globally

Sridhar Venkatapuram a Martin McKee a & David Stuckler b

a London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, England.

b Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, England.

Bulletin of the World Health Organization
Online First -Published online: 3 February 2012

“…..Noncommunicable diseases pose an increasingly high burden of disease
that threatens economic and social development, yet cost-effective health
interventions exist. World leaders recognized the compelling case for action
with the declaration at the United Nations high-level meeting on
noncommunicable diseases in September 2011.1,2

Since that meeting, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been developing
a Global Monitoring Framework and the United Nations Secretary-General is
preparing to report to the 67th session of the General Assembly in September
2012 on ways to tackle noncommunicable diseases across different sectors.


This paper aims to inform these debates by reviewing the declarations that
resulted from WHO regional meetings held in preparation for last September’s
high-level meeting (Table 1). We identified four “ethical tensions” that must be
resolved. These tensions are not exhaustive or mutually exclusive but provide
a framework for debate.

Human rights approaches

‘…Effective action on noncommunicable diseases involves addressing multiple
human rights, such as the right to information to make informed choices about
diet and activity (e.g. food labels that people can understand), the right to bodily
integrity (e.g. freedom from exposure to second-hand smoke); and the right to
health (including access to essential medicines). These human rights may
conflict with corporate rights, such as the right of pharmaceutical companies to
exploit patents or express freedom of speech (through marketing)….”


Social determinants

“….Political leaders face difficult decisions about where to invest resources along
the causal chain of disease. They must care for those already ill but also tackle the
underlying causes of the diseases….”

Funding

“…Governments must balance the needs of their own citizens with their obligations
to provide aid to other countries. There is a glaring global inequality in the burden of
noncommunicable diseases and in the domestic resources available to address
them….”

Which diseases?

“….All governments must set priorities for action, such as whether to focus on
interventions for those people in most need, those who would benefit most or on
actions that would benefit the most people. The high-level meeting initially prioritized
four diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases and diabetes)
with high mortality burdens and four risk factors (tobacco use, poor diet, harmful use
of alcohol and physical inactivity)…..”

DISPONIBLE A TEXTO OCMPLETO DESDE AQUÍ

Imagen obtenida en: WHO: Noncommunicable diseases

Legal frameworks for eHealth

Based on the findings of the second global survey on eHealth

WHO World Health Organization
GOe - Global Observatory for eHealth Series, v. 5, 2012



“…….Given that privacy of the doctor-patient relationship is at the heart of good
health care, and that the electronic health record (EHR) is at the heart of good
eHealth practice, the question arises: Is privacy legislation at the heart of the EHR?



The second global survey on eHealth conducted by the Global Observatory for
eHealth (GOe) set out to answer that question by investigating the extent to which
the legal frameworks in the Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO)
address the need to protect patient privacy in EHRs as health care systems move
towards leveraging the power of EHRs to deliver safer, more efficient, and more
accessible health care.

The survey began with a question on the existence of generic privacy legislation
followed by questions to establish if specific rules had been adopted to address
privacy in EHRs. A series of questions followed pertaining to the way in which
privacy is addressed in transmittable EHRs and patients’ rights to access, correct,
and control the use of the EHR.



The investigation ended by broaching the issue of privacy protection in secondary
uses of data contained in EHRs, such as for international research purposes. In
the present report the analysis of the survey responses is preceded by an overview
of the ethical and legal roots of privacy protection. Focusing on the ethical concepts
of autonomy, beneficence, and justice, the report reminds the reader of the early
recognition of the duty of privacy in the Hippocratic Oath and goes on to consider
how that is reflected in international binding legislation such as the United Nations
Declaration on Human Rights and the European Union Data Protection Directive,
as well as non-binding international codes of practice…..”

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Imagen obtenida en: SharpBrains

Las neuronas de Ramón y Cajal: "mariposas del alma"

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934). Corteza cerebral humana (1899)

"En este dibujo, trazado una tarde por la mano de Cajal en el Madrid depresivo
de 1899, aparecen muy bien descritas las células piramidales de la corteza
cerebral. A él le gustaba llamarlas 'mariposas del alma' [...], y no hay duda de
que la ilustración de Cajal acierta a mostrar en detalle el cuerpo celular
típicamente piramidal de estas células. Se ve también una dendrita apical
muy gruesa y erizada de espinas que sale de su vértice y asciende hacia la
superficie. De los ángulos laterales del cuerpo surge un ramillete de dendritas
basales, y de la base del mismo, un axón que desaparece del dibujo para
dirigirse a la sustancia blanca subcortical. Unas células 'delicadas y elegantes
-escribió en 1917-, cuyo batir de alas quién sabe si esclarecerá algún día el
secreto de la vida mental'."

Texto de Juan V. Fernández de la Gala.
Profesor de Historia de la Medicina y la Enfermería, Universidad de Cádiz (España).

Imagen del autor obtenida en: EcuRed