Web site links environment and health for middle schoolers

What do climate change, urban sprawl and globalization have common? All are forms of environmental change that can trigger public health problems.

What people should know and what they can do about these problems is explored in a newly redesigned website, “EcoHealth: Environmental Change and Our Health,” aimed at middle school students and their teachers as well as the general public.

“When forests are cut down or our climate is altered by emissions from fossil fuel combustion, human health is at risk, along with resultant environmental degradation,” says Jonathan Patz, a professor of population health sciences and environmental studies at UW–Madison. “We’ve shown these links in our research and are obliged to translate this knowledge to the next generation of problem solvers: our children.”

Patz and a group of collaborators at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health first developed the EcoHealth website as an educational complement to a PBS television mini-series “Journey to Planet Earth.”

Although the series ended, the site lived on, highlighting issues raised by global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, conflicts between humans and nature, agriculture and drinking water, and globalization and disease. Along with an abundance of issue-specific information, the site, now managed at UW–Madison, offers news, games, video clips, a glossary and lesson plans for teachers. With a single click, users also can translate the content into nearly 50 different languages.

“EcoHealth helps provide the context for today’s headline news,” says Patz. And because it is reviewed for accuracy and fairness by science, health and environmental experts in a wide range of specialties, the site “is a reliable resource for sorting the science from the sound bites.”