Biodiversity and Public Health: issues for a new approach

Abstract

To verify biodiversity today and the human interventions that cause and determine its destruction or conservation implies considering the phenomenon of life and the relationship between environment and health. In ecological processes the frequency of plants, animals and humans depends on the frequency of all living entities. The same happens in health where the natural history of a disease depends on the history of all diseases. It depends on natural history and on human history. The emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases demonstrate the environmental fragility balance. These problems necessarily replace the critical threshold between men and nature relationship, between biological and social categories. Disclosing the connection between these categories through Epidemiology, a structural discipline of Public Health in Brazil, permits to disclose the ecological consequences of this social practice.