Biodiversity and Human Health

PLoS Medicine has an essay describing one connection between biodiversity and human health.

In this Essay, we describe how disease risk is influenced by biological diversity and, specifically, how some host species act to reduce the risk of transmission of virulent zoonotic pathogens to people. This represents an exciting area of study where ecologists, conservation planners, and physicians can work together to reduce disease risk and maintain biological diversity. In a world where climate change may allow vector-transmitted diseases to spread from the tropics into the temperate zone, it may be sensible to conserve biological diversity for the purely selfish reasons of protecting human health.