A new call for proposals from the Wellcome Trust aims to explore the threats to human health posed by dramatic changes in our global environment and world population. Becky McCall reports.
Renowned for its novel approaches to funding health-related research, the Wellcome Trust's newly launched funding scheme—Sustaining Health—is heralded as “breaking new ground”. The scheme aims to seed research that elucidates the connections between environment, nutrition, and human health in response to the unprecedented challenge posed by global over-population and environmental change.
The £5 million scheme will explore issues relating to the world's burgeoning population, relentless urbanisation, and changing climate. It rests on the premise that human activities, in association with a global population estimated to grow to 9 billion by 2050, drive environmental changes that have consequences for human health. If relationships can be established between these various factors then novel strategies could be implemented to mitigate health risks.
Judith Wasserheit, global health professor at the Department of Global Health, University of Washington, WA, USA, points out that, “no area of research is more urgent”. She stresses that global environmental changes threaten water and food security with direct impacts on human nutrition and immune responses, and indirect impacts on health because of resulting migration and conflict.
Currently, most research funding for these issues is fragmented and misses the interconnectivity needed to source effective solutions. Wasserheit adds that solutions to these global problems need to unite investigators across areas as diverse as environmental sciences, agriculture, engineering, and health, as well as across vastly different languages, paradigms, and funding streams. “This requires extraordinary vision.”
Sustaining Health promises to deliver on this front. The remit for research proposals is deliberately broad. Richard Seabrook, Head of Business Development at the Wellcome Trust, explains: “It's relatively unique in the breadth of topics that could be addressed, because as soon as you focus closely on one particular area this limits the benefits of exploring issues from the wider perspective.”
Examples of the type of research that the Sustaining Health call might support include the influence of human-induced environmental changes on disease distribution, such as the effects of atmospheric pollution on respiratory disease often found in cities of the developing world; or the threat of climate change to food security resulting in under-nourishment and stunted growth. The rise in melanoma prevalence provides an example of two interconnected factors—human behaviour but also the increasing intensity of sunlight on health.
Indeed, Seabrook points out that exploratory approaches to modifying human behaviour are one key target for the scheme's funds. “Human behaviour is multifactorial. It's social and economic, but decisions that people make will directly or indirectly affect populations and the health of populations.”
One overarching aspect of the call emphasises the importance of data—both environmental and epidemiological. Researchers from different disciplines need to be able to access and interpret extensive data from each respective field. A case in point is represented by the large datasets about Earth—observational data that would be of value to public health scientists and epidemiologists if researchers from the relevant disciplines could facilitate access and interpretation of these data. “Similarly, Earth scientists don't necessarily know how to access and interpret public health data”, explains Seabrook.
Tony McMichael, professor of population health at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, remarked that the initiative was important because it addressed population-level disease and mortality problems that reside in the world's complex cultural, social, and environmental systems. “Urban design, the food system, and economic inequalities underlie the obesity epidemic. It's fundamentally a population-level problem of maladapted human ecology, not an individual-level problem of genes or behaviour.”
In the long view, the scheme aims to build a base of knowledge and, importantly, evidence that can inform policy. Specifically commenting on issues related to nutrition but from the perspective of senior adviser for public health at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, John Balbus notes that the call for proposals is very apt now. “This opportunity helps close a critical knowledge gap regarding the impacts of climate change on the ability to feed and adequately nourish a growing population. This is a growing concern within the climate change and health research community, which makes this effort by the Wellcome Trust very timely.”