Scientists at the Wildlife Trust are beginning to make the link between the emergence of new diseases and environmental degradation. Wildelife trust is a conservation organization with the mission of protecting endangered species from extinction and their habitats around the world. The groups' researchers have shown that habitat destruction and species loss are ecosystem disruptions that can alter disease transmission patterns.

"The loss of species, the degradation of ecological processes and the contamination of the web of life are working in concert to diminish human and environmental health on this planet," said Dr. Alonso Aguirre, director of conservation medicine at Wildlife Trust. "The global loss of biological diversity affects the well being of both animal and people."

Aguirre, a Veterinarian originally from Mexico with graduate degrees in wildlife biology and epidemiology has been working as a wildlife health specialist for the last 15 years. He spoke with The Earth Times about his research in the little known field of conservation medicine. In 1997 Wildlife Trust, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment established the Consortium for Conservation Medicine as an environmental health collaborative. With a mission of advancing biological diversity conservation and ecosystem healthiness, the group uses multi-disciplinary approaches to relate the health of humans to the health of the environment and animals. By bringing together veterinarians, physicians, ecologists and other conservation professionals, we are attempting to provide an ecological context to health management. For example, habitat damage increases stress in living things, causing greater susceptibility to disease across species and geographic boundaries.

"Conservation medicine does more than recognize the ecological context of health, it may also play an important role in protecting bio-diversity, human health, wildlife and ecosystem health," said Aguirre. We are trying to use our training as physicians and veterinarians, and the health sciences, like epidemiology and public health, as tools to protect bio-diversity."

An important part of conservation medicine is its trans-disciplinary nature. It's a new concept of trying to develop the same language among disciplines. It works to bring veterinarians, physicians, conservation biologists ecologists, even socio-biologists and even politicians together under the same roof to solve environmental problems.

"Four out of five conditions in humans are environmentally related, so we have already a connection. And the connection is health," he said.

One example is the West Nile Virus, which resurfaced again this summer in New York. When the first North American case appeared in 1999, public health officials had trouble identifying the disease. "If we have a conservation program in place in this area, we could avoid all those problems of miscommunication, lack of communication, that led to a very painful way of identifying the disease," said Aguirre. "This was the first effort at trying to bring together public health officials with zoos and wildlife specialists, because usually they never talked before."