Forests and Human Health: Assessing the Evidence

This is a review of over 650 documents focusing on human health and forests.

Executive Summary
"This study has two central concerns: the state of human health in forests, and the causal links between forests and human health. Within this framework, we consider four issues related to tropical forests and human health. First, we discuss forest foods, emphasizing the forest as a food-producing habitat, human dependence on forest foods, the nutritional contributions of such foods, and nutrition-related problems that affect forest peoples. Our second topic is disease and other health problems. In addition to the major problems - HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola and mercury poisoning - we address some 20 other tropical diseases and health problems related to forests. The third topic is medicinal products. We review the biophysical properties of medicinal species and consider related indigenous knowledge, human uses of medicinal forest products, the serious threats to forest sustainability, and the roles of traditional healers, with a discussion of the benefits of forest medicines and conflicts over their distribution. Our fourth and final topic is the cultural interpretations of human health found among forest peoples, including holistic world views that impinge on health and indigenous knowledge. The Occasional Paper concludes with some observations about the current state of our knowledge, its utility and shortcomings, and our suggestions for future research."

For each of the four focus topics, the authors present a list of policy recommendations pertaining to the state of forest people's health and the causal links between forests and human health. These recommendations are repeated at the end of each relevant chapter, to facilitate comparison between the findings and the policy recommendations. Several of these recommendations are communication-focused, such as:

Forest Foods and Nutrition:

Recommendations for health professionals

• Learn more about the health needs of forest dwellers, from the local people themselves.

Recommendations for educational and health personnel

• Counter cultural prescriptions that disadvantage females, particularly during vulnerable periods like pregnancy and lactation and during childhood.
• Educate field personnel about the links between women's status and the health of families.

Recommendations for forestry and health professionals

• Increase efforts to communicate with women and value women's views, thus contributing to a rise in women's social status, as a strategy to improve overall health.
• Collaborate effectively among disciplines and develop early warning systems about food availability and people's nutritional status.
• Share databases in efforts to avert local health crises due to seasonality and 'development'.

Diseases and Other Health Problems:

Recommendations for health professionals

• Establish facilities along transportation routes to provide education on AIDS and the potential dangers of wildlife-human interactions.

Recommendations for government agencies

• Expand efforts to strengthen the status of marginalised groups, including women and girls.

Medicinal Products:

Recommendation for health care professionals

• Exert greater efforts to marry traditional and 'modern' health care systems in and around forested areas by working with traditional healers, assessing traditional medications, and understanding traditional health-related worldviews.