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As the human population grows, more and more people are moving to the sea.
At present, more than half the world's population lives in what is classified
as a coastal area. As this number increases, so too does the potential for humans
to disrupt marine environments, and for marine environments to affect human
health.
In recognition of that potential, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and
the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) recently announced
funding for four joint research centers — at the University of Hawaii,
the University of Miami, the University of Washington and Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution (WHOI) — to bring together experts from biological, medical
and oceanographic disciplines to conduct basic research into how marine phenomena
may harm or enhance people's health.
The drive to establish the Centers for Oceans and Human Health began as a bottom-up
movement in the scientific community, says John Stegeman, director of the center
at WHOI. "The centers are the outgrowth of . . . activity in the scientific
community that recognized growing and poorly understood threats to human health
from biological materials that are in or are put into coastal waters,"
Stegeman says. "It was understood by the scientific community that these
problems were not being addressed adequately."
The idea to study the relationship between the oceans and human health truly
sprouted, however, with the development of the Global Ocean Observing System
in the mid-1990s, says Anthony Knap, director of the Bermuda Biological Station
for Research. A unique advantage of the new U.S. program, he says, is the pairing
of NIEHS, one of the member institutes of the National Institutes of Health,
with NSF — in other words, linking researchers primarily concerned about
human health with those primarily interested in ocean science. "The pairing
between the NIEHS and NSF is a great way to start," Knap says. "To
get public health people and environmental health people together is just not
easy. This will certainly help to put those together."
The program chose the institutional sites of the four centers based on peer
review of dozens of proposals for the centers. Each will have a different focus.
The University of Hawaii center, for example, which is already active, will
study ciguatoxin-producing organisms and try to develop better ways to detect
those toxins, according to Ed Laws, director of the Hawaii center. Ciguatoxins,
produced by dinoflagellates and other algae, cause gastrointestinal and neurological
symptoms in humans who have eaten contaminated fish.
Laws' group, he says, will also search for compounds in marine organisms that
have pharmaceutical potential. While the work, which has already begun, will
hone in on Hawaiian waters, Laws says that some projects, such as the development
of a ciguatoxin detector, will require samples from around the world, such as
the Caribbean and French Polynesia, where ciguatoxin poisoning is a big problem.
In Miami, the research efforts will concentrate on the biology and genomics
of microbes in recreational waters in the subtropics and tropics. Lora Fleming,
director of the University of Miami center, says that the university's experience
in geography and the biomedical and oceanic sciences, coupled with existing
collaboration among scientists in the disciplines, played a decisive role in
Miami's successful application. Fleming says that Miami's subtropical location,
coupled with its proximity to the highly stressed tropical Caribbean Sea, will
fuel the development of research projects whose results can be applied to other
tropical areas around the world. Center-funded research will begin this month,
she says.
The WHOI team, which includes the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, will focus on the biology of harmful algae and pathogens
in the Gulf of Maine as well as the physical oceanographic factors that affect
their abundance and dispersal, Stegeman says. And the center at the University
of Washington will research toxic algae in the Puget Sound area and how consumption
of contaminated seafood affects human health — particularly among vulnerable
populations, such as children.
Knap is looking forward to the day when results from study at the centers begin
to appear. "It is going to be interesting to see how successful these centers
are," he says. "Public health people think a lot differently than
scientists, so the question is, how do you put that together?"
David Lawrence
Geotimes contributing writer
Links:
National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
National
Science Foundation
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