New Gift for Research on Sustainable Public Health

"SAGE has received a $240,000 gift from an anonymous donor directed towards research on environmental public health, the area of focus of  UW-Madison Professor Jonathan Patz. Patz plans to leverage these funds to further build  a major initiative on Sustainable Public Health -- Patz describes this as, "Health for today's populations without compromising natural resources needed for the health of future generations."

Patz has appointments both in SAGE/ Nelson Institute and the Department of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison, and directs a university-wide initiative on global environmental public health. He also is President of the International Association for Ecology and Health, which publishes the journal EcoHealth.  For over a decade, Dr. Patz has  served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared with Al Gore the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting and disseminating scientific evidence of the connections between human activities and global warming.

Professor Patz studies ways in which changes in the environment can adversely affect people's well-being. The greater their scale, the more serious the health implications may be. Consider these examples that his research team, along with faculty from across the UW campus, is already studying:

•Tropical deforestation in the Amazon has favored the proliferation of an aggressive mosquito species that carries malaria, triggering a regional resurgence of the disease.

•Severe heat waves killed 730 people in Chicago in 1995 and over 70,000 across Europe in 2003. Global warming is expected to generate more frequent record-setting heat waves and episodes of air pollution.

•Urban sprawl has made Americans increasingly dependent on automobiles and other forms of transportation that preclude physical activity, possibly contributing to our nation’s "obesity crisis" and the increased incidence of diabetes. Thus, new urban transportation and/or urban design policies can directly benefit public health.

Connections between human health and environmental conditions are undeniable, yet our society often fails to anticipate health problems caused by environmental change. To identify, assess, and address potential threats before they become national or international emergencies, health care professionals, public decision makers, and the general public must better understand the connections – and the alternatives.

With this timely gift, Professor Patz plans to continue to expand research on the links between public health and the global environment, and begin a major fundraising campaign to launch a first-of-its-kind, research and training program on Sustainable Public Health.