C’is the story of a particularly audacious intellectual construction, published on September 6 in the magazine Sciencewith great fanfare. And for good reason: in wanting to demonstrate the links that unite health to planetary ecosystems, a young environmental economist, Eyal G. Frank, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, is said to have succeeded in an explosive “demonstration”. The death of 1,300 babies in the United States is said to be directly linked to the use of pesticides, by a complex chain of causality: the decline in bat populations, great insect devourers, is said to have led farmers to increase their use of insecticides, leading to an increase in the mortality of children under one year old.
Relayed worldwide by the mainstream press, this study deserves attention because it illustrates a new approach that is increasingly popular in environmental sciences: the “One Health” approach, which aims to promote globalized health policies that integrate the interdependence of human societies with their ecosystems, and which has the methodological characteristic of “favoring the global approach over the exhaustive study of details”, according to the definition given by the agroecology dictionary.
‘White Nose Syndrome’ Linked to Infant Mortality
The sole author of the study, economist Eyal G. Frank, wanted to demonstrate how the […] Read more
