Intensified food production and correlated risks to human health in the Greater Mekong Subregion: a systematic review

Environmental Health

Review

Carsten H. Richter¹  Jennifer A. Steele²  Bruce A. Wilcox³  Benjamin Custer⁴  Jianchu Xu⁴ 

[1] Center for Mountain Ecosystem Studies, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 650201, Kunming, China;Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China;Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University, 01536, North Grafton, MA, USA;Global Health Asia, Integrative Education and Research Programme, Faculty of Public Health, Mahidol University, 10400, Bangkok, Thailand;World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), East and Central Asia Region, 650201, Kunming, China;

关键词: Greater Mekong Subregion;    Intensified food production;    Agricultural intensification;    Emerging diseases;    Pesticides;    Antibiotics;    Livestock operations;    Health promotion;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12940-015-0033-8

 received in 2014-12-04, accepted in 2015-05-18,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIntensified food production, i.e. agricultural intensification and industrialized livestock operations may have adverse effects on human health and promote disease emergence via numerous mechanisms resulting in either direct impacts on humans or indirect impacts related to animal and environmental health. For example, while biodiversity is intentionally decreased in intensive food production systems, the consequential decrease in resilience in these systems may in turn bear increased health risks. However, quantifying these risks remains challenging, even if individual intensification measures are examined separately. Yet, this is an urgent task, especially in rapidly developing areas of the world with few regulations on intensification measures, such as in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS).MethodsWe systematically searched the databases PubMed and Scopus for recent studies conducted on the association between agricultural (irrigation, fertilization, pesticide application) and livestock (feed additives, animal crowding) intensification measures and human health risks in the GMS. The search terms used were iteratively modified to maximize the number of retrieved studies with relevant quantitative data.ResultsWe found that alarmingly little research has been done in this regard, considering the level of environmental contamination with pesticides, livestock infection with antibiotic resistant pathogens and disease vector proliferation in irrigated agroecosystems reported in the retrieved studies. In addition, each of the studies identified focused on specific aspects of intensified food production and there have been no efforts to consolidate the health risks from the simultaneous exposures to the range of hazardous chemicals utilized.ConclusionsWhile some of the studies identified already reported environmental contamination bearing considerable health risks for local people, at the current state of research the actual consolidated risk from regional intensification measures cannot be estimated. Efforts in this area of research need to be rapidly and considerably scaled up, keeping pace with the current level of regional intensification and the speed of pesticide and drug distribution to facilitate the development of agriculture related policies for regional health promotion.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Richter et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015