SCIENTIFIC CREDIBILITY

EcoHealth is the brainchild of Dr. Jonathan Patz, Associate Professor at the highly regarded University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, where he directs a university-wide initiative on Global Environmental Health. He also directs a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored training and research program, that includes a special Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). He teaches graduate-level courses, for example one entitled "Health Impact Assessment of Global Environmental Change," and is called to lecture at numerous national and international meetings addressing climate, ecological change and health.

Several years ago, following a lecture Dr. Patz gave at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, an audience member from the Gottesman Fund suggested creating a website that would make cutting-edge environmental science accessible to students and teachers. EcoHealth the result of that idea. The site distills Patz' internationally recognized expertise and course materials—along with stacks of scientific research, reports, articles, books, and interviews.

Through EcoHealth's gestation, Dr. Patz, website educator and creative director Marjorie L. Share, and their colleagues have carefully reviewed all material. They continue to monitor and update the site to ensure that it reflects the latest and most accurate scientific information.

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CORE TOPICS

EcoHealth has five major chapters or topics. The first screen or page of each chapter provides a menu of sub-topics or subjects for that chapter. The site map serves as an overall table of contents. Search boxes atop each screen allow you to locate particular subjects or areas of interest anywhere on the site.

Taking Our Temperature

• Take a detailed look at global warming and its consequences.
• Find out how climate change may spark extreme weather: droughts, hurricanes, violent storms, and floods.
• Learn about the risk of new epidemics: cholera, malaria, SARS, West Nile virus, Chagas' disease, and more.
• Discover why El Niño may offer a "sneak preview" of our climatic future.
• Distinguish between good and bad ozone.
• Explore potential solutions to global warming.

Hole in the 'Zone

• Get an overview of stratospheric ozone depletion.
• See how ozone forms.
• Learn how scientists discovered the hole in the ozone layer and identified its causes.
• Discover how the sun's rays affect your health, and what you can do today to protect yourself.
• Read about international efforts to protect the ozone layer.

Unbalancing Act

• See how human actions disturb the balance of nature.
• Find out how modern agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, diverting rivers, and other human actions affect biodiversity.
• Peer into nature's medicine chest.
• Explore secrets of animal behavior that could boost human health.
• Learn how environmental degradation abets the spread of disease.

What's Left to Eat?

• Face the challenges of feeding a growing population.
• Learn how water scarcity affects food supplies, malnutrition, and the cost of groceries.
• Explore the crucial role that worms, bees, and nematodes play on even the most technologically sophisticated farms.
• Weigh the benefits and costs of industrial farming—e.g., fattening cattle on huge feedlots—and discover alternatives.
• Examine the promises and perils of genetic engineering, reliance on chemicals for agriculture, and the growth of fish farming.

Our Small World

• See how globalization presents both opportunities and concerns.
• Learn the difficulties of fighting diseases without borders.
• Find out about policing pollution in a global era.
• Understand the "bio" in bioterrorism.

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FEATURES

Glossary: Throughout this site, glossary entries appear in bold brown. Links to the complete glossary appear at the top and bottom of each screen. The glossary was created specifically for EcoHealth, so some words or phrases (such as airport malaria or squalamine), may be too new or specialized to appear in a classroom or household dictionary. Such terms could be the basis of a lesson on how language evolves to reflect new discoveries and insights.

	Purple icons and links appear at the bottom of most EcoHealth pages. They lead to pop-up sections that help students connect website material (linking environmental change and health) to their own lives.
	Blue icons and links appear at the bottom of most EcoHealth pages. They lead to pop-up sections that connect distant scientific topics to relevant daily life.

Images: Photographs, charts, graphs, and maps from diverse sources enrich EcoHealth's pages and make the site more appealing to students. Source links also offer a wealth of additional resources.

Links: Throughout EcoHealth, you'll find links to other parts of the site and to high-quality, external resources where you and students can explore and learn more.

Questions & Answers: Grouped by EcoHealth chapter, these queries can help you anticipate students' (or parents') inquiries, delve more deeply into topics that interest your pupils, create classroom projects, and draft assessment questions.

Video clips come from Journey to Planet Earth, a companion PBS television series. They feature people and situations that highlight some of the issues discussed in EcoHealth.

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PBS PARTNERSHIP

EcoHealth is a proud partner of Journey to Planet Earth, a television series launched by PBS in 2003. Hosted by award-winning actor and screenwriter Matt Damon, the series explores the relationship between people and the natural world. Short videos from the series appear throughout the website.

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GETTING AROUND

You can explore EcoHealth in a variety of ways:

• The navigation box on the left side of each page links to the site's five major content areas.
• The site map serves as a site-wide table of contents.
• Links at the top and bottom of each screen take you to resource pages.
• Arrows at the top and bottom of each screen help you move around each chapter or major topic.
• You can enter search terms at the top of each screen.

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LESSON PLANS

The links below lead to standards-based lessons related to each EcoHealth sections.

Lesson Authors

• Victoria Babcock teaches biology, botany, and zoology at DeSoto High School in DeSoto, Missouri. Before becoming a teacher, Ms. Babcock was an outreach educator for the St. Louis Science Center.
• Janet Collier teaches World Cultures, Geography and World History at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland. Before becoming a teacher, Ms. Collier worked as an editor. In addition to writing the lesson plans for Our Small World, the Glossary and the Newspage, she is editor of the EcoHealth website and uses EcoHealth in her classroom.

TAKING OUR TEMPERATURE

Water, Water, Everywhere—Is It Safe?
Students explore the contents of untreated water, using a microscope to find organisms. They then create their own filtering system to clean the water. Finally, students research water-borne pathogens that may be increasing in number due to effects of global warming.

Weather or Not It Might Make Us Sick
Students monitor weather forecasts for four weeks. They assess the accuracy of predictions and determine whether local weather reflects the impact of global warming.

Greenhouse Gases Exposed
Students perform a controlled experiment, then record and analyze their data. The lesson deepens understanding of the relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming.

Birds, Mosquitoes, and Viruses
Students distinguish between direct and indirectly transmitted diseases and participate in a group game to simulate the spread of vector-borne diseases. They then research a particular pathogenic disease to learn how global warming—and biodiversity loss—can affect disease transmission. This lesson works with several chapters of the website.

HOLE IN THE 'ZONE

Is My Sunscreen Working?
Students use UV-sensitive bacteria to test the effectiveness of various products.

Create a UV Warning Scale
Students learn about the dangers of UV radiation and create warning scales for tracking UV levels in their community.

UNBALANCING ACT

Celebrate Biodiversity Placemat
Students create restaurant placemats containing puzzles and games about diversity. This activity provides a fun route toward a deeper understanding of biodiversity, its importance, and the impact of human actions.

Genetically Modified Foods: What Do You Think?
Students research current studies and uses of genetic engineering. They then conduct a role-playing forum that focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating genetically modified foods into society. This may also be used with the chapter “What's Left to Eat?”

Nature's Store
Students research medicinal uses of plants, correlating loss of habitat to loss of valuable medicine. Drawing on their research, pupils then create a “sales pitch” that tries to convince the owner of an imaginary drug store to stock plant products.

OUR SMALL WORLD

Globalization: How and Why, From Here to There
Through these three activities students will have the opportunity to explore today’s globalization and its effects, both good and bad. They will have fun while building upon Our Small World and the importance of natural resources, free trade and the spread of disease.

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CLASS PREP

Background Information: Get a solid, up-to-date grounding in a variety of science curriculum topics. It can also be a resource for geography, history, language arts, and math.

Current Events: Find examples and details related to topics that surface often in the news. Such information can help you frame talking points and questions for class discussions, assignments, and projects. Awareness of scientific news can help students grasp that science is far from static. New discoveries and insights constantly emerge.

Images: Use them as departure points for class discussion while helping students improve their skill at reading maps, charts, and graphs.

Links: Connect students with sources for delving deeper into a topic. Help pupils explore the work of NASA, NOAA, CDC, WHO, NIH and other agencies working on the frontiers of science and medicine.

Questions & Answers: Grouped by EcoHealth section, these queries can help you anticipate students' (or parents') inquiries, research subjects that interest your pupils, and draft test questions.

Updated Information: EcoHealth connects your lessons to the latest science news and can help you determine whether textbooks and other classroom materials reflect current scientific research.

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STUDENT PROJECTS

EcoHealth offers students a wealth of information for papers and projects. Here are just a few examples of how pupils might use the site (especially during independent activity times or in pursuit of extra credit) to think critically, hone their research and writing skills, and deepen their understanding of key scientific topics.

Ecosystems: Form small groups of students and assign each group a different ecosystem, such as forests or coral reefs . Direct each group to use EcoHealth as a tool for reporting on how global environmental changes have affected that ecosystem.

Logical Reasoning: Have student pairs debate environmental issues using data from EcoHealth to buttress their arguments. Sample debate topics include:

• All farming should be organic.
• Clean water is a key part of fighting disease.
• Everyone should stop eating fish.
• Genetic engineering is our best tool for feeding everyone on Earth.
• Global warming is just part of a natural cycle.
• Grocery prices don't reflect the true cost of food.
• Malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases can't be stopped.
• Ordinary people can't really do anything to stop the destruction of our environment.
• People worry too much about the environment.
• The U.S. government should raise gasoline taxes to encourage conservation.
• Globalization encourages the spread of diseases.

Observation: Have students look out the classroom windows and identify five or more things that affect human health.

Science News: Invite students to picture themselves as newspaper editors. Have them find news articles on EcoHealth topics and then use the site to learn more about the subject. Ask each student to critique an article. Discussion might include whether the author's facts seem reliable and key points that are not covered in the story. Have students draft “editing notes” that offer suggestions for revision.

Vocabulary: Have students create crossword puzzles or stories using entries from the EcoHealth glossary.

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SCIENCE STANDARDS

All EcoHealth content meets or exceeds the National Science Education Standards (developed by the National Research Council) for grades 5-8. The site particularly targets the following standards:

Content Standard B: Physical Science

• Substances react chemically in characteristic ways to form new substances.
• Heat moves in predictable ways
• The sun is a major source of energy for changes on the earth's surface.

Content Standard C: Life Science

• Disease is a breakdown in structures or functions of an organism.
• Reproduction is a characteristic of all living systems.
• All organisms must be able to obtain and use resources while living in a constantly changing external environment.
• An organism's behavior evolves through adaptation to its environment.
• All populations living together and the physical factors with which they interact compose an ecosystem.
• Populations of organisms can be categorized by the function they serve in an ecosystem.
• The number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on the resources available and a variety of abiotic factors.
• Millions of species of animals, plants, and microorganisms are alive today.
• Biological evolution accounts for the diversity of species developed through gradual processes over many generations.
• Extinction of a species occurs when the environment changes and the adaptive characteristics of a species are insufficient to allow its survival.

Content Standard D: Earth and Space Science

• Soil consists of weathered rocks and decomposed organic material from dead plants, animals, and bacteria.
• Water evaporates from the earth's surface, rises and cools as it moves to higher elevations, condenses as rain or snow and falls back to the surface.
• The atmosphere is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases that include water vapor and carbon dioxide.
• Global patterns of atmospheric movement influence local weather. Oceans have a major effect on weather and climate.
• Living organisms have played many roles in the earth system including affecting the composition of the atmosphere.

Content Standard E: Science and Technology

• Science and technology are reciprocal. Science helps drive technology and technology is essential to science.
• Perfectly designed solutions do not exist. All technological solutions have tradeoffs.
• Technological designs have constraints that may limit choices in design.
• Technological solutions have intended benefits and unintended consequences. Some consequences can be predicted, others cannot.

Content Standard F: Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

• Food provides energy and nutrients for growth and development. Nutrition requirements vary with body weight, age, sex, activity, and body functioning.
• Natural environments may contain substances that are harmful to human beings.
• Maintaining environmental health involves establishing or monitoring quality standards related to use of soil, water, and air.
• When an area becomes overpopulated, the environment will become degraded due to the increased use of resources.
• Causes of environmental degradation and resource depletion vary from region to region and from country to country.
• Human activities can induce hazards through resource acquisition, urban growth, land use decisions, and waste disposal. Such activities can accelerate many natural changes.
• Risk analysis considers the type of hazard and estimates the number of people that might be exposed and the number likely to suffer consequences.
• Students should understand the risks of natural hazards, chemical hazards (including pollution), biological hazards and social hazards.
• Individuals can use a systematic approach to thinking critically about risks and benefits.
• Science influences society through its knowledge and world view. Scientific knowledge and the procedures used by scientists influence the way many individuals in society think about others and the environment.
• The effect of science on society is neither entirely beneficial nor entirely detrimental.
• Social challenges often inspire questions for scientific research, and social priorities often influence research priorities through the availability of funding for research.
• Technology influences society through its products and processes. Technology influences the quality of life and the ways people act and interact. Technological changes are often accompanied by social, political, and economic changes that can be beneficial or detrimental to individuals and society.
• Science cannot answer all questions and technology cannot solve all human problems or meet all human needs.

Content Standard G: History and Nature of Science

• Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models.
• In areas where active research is being pursued and in which there is not a great deal of experimental or observational evidence and understanding, it is normal for scientists to differ with one another about the interpretation of the evidence or theory being considered.
• Different scientists might publish conflicting experimental results or might draw different conclusions from the same data.

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