The COVID-19 pandemic started in the cold months of the year 2020 in the Northern hemisphere. Concerns were raised that the hot season may lead to additional problems as some typical interventions to prevent heat-related illness could potentially conflict with precautions to reduce coronavirus transmission. Therefore, an international research team organized by the Global Health Heat Information Network generated an inventory of the specific concerns about this nexus and began to address the issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is limited European literature on nursing and sustainability; nursing students are poorly prepared on the connections between resources, climate change, sustainability, and health, so they must acquire knowledge and develop skills and competencies in this field. The use of digital technologies and teaching via E-learning has grown, and has been widely adopted as a learning method for nursing.
Objectives: The aim of the current study was to test and evaluate digital educational materials on environmental sustainability and health, in the context of university nursing education in different European countries.
Background: In the next 25years, transformative changes, in particular the rapid pace of technological development and data availability, will require environmental epidemiologists to prioritize what should (rather than could) be done to most effectively improve population health.
Objectives: In this essay, we map out key driving forces that will shape environmental epidemiology in the next 25years. We also identify how the field should adapt to best take advantage of coming opportunities and prepare for challenges.
Introduction: Education in sustainable development is a goal recognised by a large number of countries and a vital concept in healthcare. It is therefore important that nurse education incorporates elements of sustainable development into nursing education curricula. However, there is limited research on student nurses' attitudes towards sustainability and no comparison of attitudes towards sustainability and its inclusion in the nursing curriculum across Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2015
Although people will most likely adjust to warmer temperatures, it is still difficult to assess what this adaptation will look like. This scenario-based integrated health impacts assessment explores baseline (1981-2010) and future (2050) population attributable fractions (PAF) of mortality due to heat (PAFheat) and cold (PAFcold), by combining observed temperature-mortality relationships with the Dutch KNMI'14 climate scenarios and three adaptation scenarios. The 2050 model results without adaptation reveal a decrease in PAFcold (8.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
August 2015
There is growing evidence of climate change affecting infectious disease risk in Western Europe. The call for effective adaptation to this challenge becomes increasingly stronger. This paper presents the results of a survey exploring Dutch expert perspectives on adaptation responses to climate change impacts on infectious disease risk in Western Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is clear that globalization is something more than a purely economic phenomenon manifesting itself on a global scale. Among the visible manifestations of globalization are the greater international movement of goods and services, financial capital, information and people. In addition, there are technological developments, more transboundary cultural exchanges, facilitated by the freer trade of more differentiated products as well as by tourism and immigration, changes in the political landscape and ecological consequences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change possibly affects public health in the Netherlands, including changes in (a) temperature-related effects, heat stress and air pollution, (b) allergies, (c) vector borne infectious disease, and (d) food- and waterborne infectious disease. Due to many prevailing uncertainties, opinions differ regarding the exact size of the expected health risks and the speed at which these might occur, as well as regarding to what degree society would need to or could adapt to these potential health effects. Thus, the gaps in our knowledge are substantial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper describes a conceptual framework for the health implications of globalization. The framework is developed by first identifying the main determinants of population health and the main features of the globalization process. The resulting conceptual model explicitly visualises that globalization affects the institutional, economic, social-cultural and ecological determinants of population health, and that the globalization process mainly operates at the contextual level, while influencing health through its more distal and proximal determinants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBull World Health Organ
April 2004
This paper reviews the health dimension and sociocultural, economic, and ecological determinants of health in existing global scenario studies. Not even half of the 31 scenarios reviewed gave a good description of future health developments and the different scenario studies did not handle health in a consistent way. Most of the global driving forces of health are addressed adequately in the selected scenarios, however, and it therefore would have been possible to describe the future developments in health as an outcome of these multiple driving forces.
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