Traffic report
Welcome to visitor number 10,000*, who followed a link here from Effect Measure, where you can find out everything that is and isn’t known about Avian Flu. So, with kudos to Revere, I’ll take the opportunity to post a few comments on environment and public health. For some reason, there seems to be more general acceptance of uncertainty on health matters than on, say, climate. At least I have never heard Bush say it was necessary to have certainty that the Avian flu has mutated before making decisions, even if his decisions have left much to be desired. And those who have serious ailments have no problem with the idea of getting second and even third professional and other opinions about what to do, and aren’t surprised to get different answers.
There is another observation I have been wanting to make. Public Health docs seem to have no problem taking on the political battles needed to promote public health. In fact, the Code of Ethics of the American Public Health Association requires this:
We promote the scientific and professional foundation of public health practice and policy, advocate the conditions for a healthy global society, emphasize prevention and enhance the ability of members to promote and protect environmental and community health.
as do the AMA Principles of Medical Ethics:
III.”A physician shall respect the law and also recognize a responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient.”
And its a good thing too. Otherwise, our rivers might still be valued more as sewers, and our lives more miserable and short. In many places in this world, they still are.
So why is it that, in the environmental arena, scientists still dance around taking positions on policy issues? Hopefully, this is changing. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is somewhat of a breakthrough in that it explicitly connects ecosystems – which happen to also be the source of avian flu – to human well-being. The connection to human well-being is also implicit in the concept of ecosystem services, which refers to economically significant benefits that ecosystems provide for humans. More on that later.
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*At least according to site meter. I have no idea how many visitors this site has actually had. Statistics provided by my webhost show over 40,000 visits and over 12,000 unique visitors. Of course, that includes RSS feeds, admin, and peddlers of poker and piills (I delete about 75 spam comments and trackbacks a day. My apologies if I have accidentally deleted anything legit.) This blog was launched last February.
