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Health and environment are linked, UB physician says
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
Powerful ties bind our health to our environment, a UB physician said yesterday during a lecture that examined a spectrum of health problems ranging from diseases that afflict isolated nomadic tribes atop the highest peaks in the Himalayas to disorders that impact the suburbanites who populate UB's regional backyard.
Richard V. Lee, professor in the departments of Medicine, Pediatrics and Obstetrics, and adjunct professor in the departments of Social and Preventive Medicine and Anthropology, took his audience on a trip around the world, using images from his travels to remote regions in Africa, South America and Asia in the final lecture of the 2007 UBThisSummer lecture series entitled "Geographic Medicine: Why We Get Sick the Way We Do."
"We get sick because of the way our bodies and our minds react to the environments in which we live," he said. "In each of these environments, people live very differently."
He explained that the diseases that affect specific populations are based on factors related to the "micro-environment" and "macro-environment." The first includes a population's typical food, clothes, personal hygiene, local climate and contact with birds and animals; the second includes such elements as transportation, agriculture and industries, and global climate.
"One of the features of the global climate change that we're experiencing now is the extension of mean average temperatures further north and further south so that the range of ticks and mosquitoes has extended," Lee noted, adding that countries such as Kenya and Russia are experiencing increases in mosquitoes- and tick-borne diseases, respectively.
A typical U.S. citizen rarely thinks about the many diseases that afflict populations across the globe, he said. These include foot infections—common in rural China due to snails that live in the stagnant water of rice paddies—as well as intestinal problems that affect populations in India that use dung to construct and heat homes due to deforestation. Skin and eye diseases are common in populations of Central Asia due to the lack of protection from ultraviolet light at high altitudes, he said, plus goiters plague villagers in the Himalayas, since mountains filter vital minerals such as iodine from the water. A similar problem once existed in the Buffalo-Niagara region due to the Great Lakes, he added.
"The Great Lakes area used to be one of the great goiter belts of the world," Lee noted. "Then we started to iodize salt and our goiter problem improved significantly."
New problems start to arise when populations begin gathering into tight-knit communities, he said, noting that communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and Pott's disease (a form of tuberculosis that affects the spine) afflict Tibetan villagers.
Suburban populations in industrialized nations are at greater risk for diseases such as obesity and type-2 diabetes due to little physical exercise and excessive food intake, he added.
"If you look at the weights of people in suburbia, they're creeping up," Lee said, noting that humans evolved to survive situations in which low food supplies and intense physical labor were the norm. "Our genes are not keeping up," he said. "We're too good at storing calories and fat."
Most of the diseases that are prevented in the industrialized world depend on artificial means, he added, including infrastructure that provides sanitary sewers and a clean water supply. Historical situations, such as the diphtheria outbreak that afflicted the former Soviet Union in the mid-1990s due to the failure of government infrastructure after the collapse of communism, illustrate the vital nature of these often-ignored resources, he said.
"We live in a privileged state in Buffalo," Lee said. "It's important to remember that we live in an artifice, and that it's important to keep that artifice up."