Wildlife access (for meat) critical to children's health

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/wcs-wac112111.php

Public release date: 21-Nov-2011

Contact: John Delaney
[e-mail]
718-220-3275
http://www.wcs.org/">Wildlife Conservation Society

Wildlife access critical to children's health

Experts from UC Berkeley, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and the Wildlife Conservation Society find powerful connection between wildlife access and prevention of critical childhood nutritional deficiencies in Madagascar

For the first time, researchers have uncovered a powerful connection between loss of access to wildlife and micronutrient deficiencies in children, according to a recently published study by the University of California-Berkeley, Harvard Center for the Environment and Harvard School of Public Health, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and others.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on marine and terrestrial wildlife -- both of which have been declining in terms of diversity and abundance around the world -- as a primary source of food. The new study addresses what has been less understood: how such reductions in wildlife populations impact the health and livelihoods of subsistence communities who depend on them.

The study --titled "Benefits of Wildlife Consumption to Child Nutrition in a Biodiversity Hotspot" -- appears this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors of the study include: Christopher D. Golden of Harvard University's Center for the Environment, Lia C. H. Fernald, Justin S. Brashares, and Claire Kremen of the University of California at Berkeley, and B. J. Rodolph Rasolofoniaina, a local member of Golden's research team in Madagascar. Golden, Brashares, Kremen and Rasolofoniaina have all been long-time research associates of Wildlife Conservation Society.

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[Lorien]

1. Watch "forks over knives"

animal protein is only critical to lining big pharma's pockets.

[NickB79]

2. This study looked at children in Madagascar

Are you going to tell us about how Big Pharma controls Madagascar now?

[Nihil]

3. i.e., "Malnutrition causes problems" or, more generally, "Too many humans cause problems"?

This strikes me as a thinly-veiled play for vitamin supplements
and other pharmaceuticals combined with tacit support for the
"bushmeat" industry as the only alternative.

The only concern apparently shown about the damage being done to
the environment is that it will lead to greater human problems
later as the supply of "bushmeat" is being exterminated ... nothing
about unsustainable human population growth being the underlying issue ...