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Environmental causes of disease in the Anthropocene. A paramount PNEI view

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/pnei2025oa21275
Inviata
ottobre 14, 2025
Pubblicato
28-10-2025

Abstract

We (the humans) live in a terrestrial environment, where we find and use air, water, food and all the necessary resources for our survival and activity needs. Everyone engages in a daily and intimate relationship with the environment, where one should consider that we are not owners but guests, in a reciprocal, natural and responsible interaction with all other forms of life.
One World view (in the sense that we all live on the same unique planet) and One Health view (in the sense that all live beings on the planet share many health and disease mechanisms) are the basic philosophical, biomedical and logical paradigms of ecology on Earth: the common house for all live beings, including us, on this planet (the only one available for the known ecosystems so far).
We received terrestrial resources from our ancestors (and their ecological cohabitants), through our parents, and we leave what remains as a basic heritage to our children and descendants, who should hopefully be able to live on Earth in future times with the same chances and quality of life that was offered to each one of us.
The environment however accumulates the consequences of all the preceding insults caused by us and by our human predecessors, who started centuries and centuries ago to extract, construct, modify, pollute every part of the planet, which now carries all the human modifications evident in the present times (Anthropocene).

Since the industrial revolution (started less than three centuries ago) humans potentiated enormously their capacity to modify the environment, often for improving human life, but almost always by destroying ecosystems and depauperating the natural resources in many aspects.
The PNEI paradigm that inspires us, a group of physicians and health professionals of the 21st century, and also human beings intellectually able to recognize and appreciate the mindbody relationships within each individual, may be very useful to interpret the complex interplay network equilibria existing in the ecological systems between different forms of life and regulating health and disease in every living organism. Such a network-based PNEI paradigm can be, at present, the best basic knowledge to appreciate and correct the environmental causes of disease, before it is too late, for humans and for other forms of life. Climate changes on Earth in the current decades show us that it may be already too late to revert the situation to previous sustainable equilibria.
We shall discuss here some peculiar aspects of these complex but fundamental issues regulating ecosystems, in a One Health perspective and with the PNEI paradigm well in focus.

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