国际英语资讯:Conservation found not associated with reduced levels of infectious disease_时事

国际英语资讯:Conservation found not associated with reduced levels of infectious disease

Even though cities crowd people together, the net benefit of their services results in reductions of infectious disease.

"It seems pretty clear that urbanization is good for people's health -- at least when it comes to infectious disease. And that's good news, because the world is rapidly urbanizing," Wood was quoted as saying in a news release.

Relying on the UW-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease database, a worldwide effort to document premature death and disability from hundreds of diseases and injuries from 1990 to the present, the researchers compared data on 24 infectious diseases with separate, published data on population density, wealth, bird and mammal species richness, forest cover, precipitation and other environmental measures to analyze the effects these factors had, if any, on disease burden per country.

Being the first to look at the association between biodiversity and disease over time, the study revealed no relationship between biodiversity, or number of species present, and the overall burden of infectious disease over the 20-year period.

But for each individual disease, ranging from malaria, dengue and rabies to typhoid, tuberculosis and leprosy, there was a unique set of drivers that were important in deciding whether burden increased or decreased over time.

For example, as rates of precipitation went up, so did the burden of "geohelminths," a group of gut parasites that includes hookworm, whipworm and roundworm.