The Bionomic Approach to Help Screening the Environmental Role in Preventing Human Disease

Background: Human and natural sciences are led to a systemic turn by the paradigm shift, which changes ingrained beliefs and produces new upgrading disciplines. Bionomics upgrades traditional Ecology by being conscious that Life on Earth is organized in complex living systems and that it is possible to define a state of health for each level. This chapter aims to demonstrate the aptitude of bionomic principles to evaluate this health in a very synthetic way and relate it with the incidence of human diseases, discovering other correlations besides the conventional ones.

Theory and Methods: Principles and primary methods of Bionomics are briefly recalled, as a synthetic framework needed to recognize the main landscape syndromes and some unexpected correlations between environmental alteration and human health, even independently from pollution. A short exposition of some research in CD and NCD (e.g., Covid-19 contagion dynamics), and cancer incidence in the EU, will be presented.

Results: Bionomic Functionality (BF) and Biological Territorial Capacity of vegetation (BTC) emerge as the most decisive correlation significance in these examples. A harmful diagnosis of the health of a landscape unit (LU) shows various possible complex pathways of human morbidity. A proposal of environmental anamnesis to check a patient's environmental conditions through 30 questions derived from the main sets of landscape syndromes is provided.

Interpretation: Many landscape processes influence human health and play an essential role in disease development. Doctors repair the damages to human health, but most of these due to environmental alterations must be educated even in bionomics. So, doctors will widen their vision on public health: anamnesis, diagnosis, and therapy have a good help even from bionomics.