Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Catching up with Google Health and Bees
I've been on vacation, so the Health Horizons blog has been silent for the last several days. During this time, a couple of interesting articles have appeared in the popular press.
A New York Times article -- "Google and Microsoft Look to Change Health Care" -- hits on a topic that we've explored in this blog. The article doesn't provide much in the way of new information, though it does report on a recent Harris surveyed that showed that "52 percent of adults sometimes or frequently go to the Web for health information, up from 29 percent in 2001," and "58 percent of people who look online for health information discussed what they found with their doctors in the last year."
This data further confirms trends that we highlighted at our Spring Conference on Biocitizens and New Media Technologies. As the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School is quoted as saying, "'In the future, health care will be a much more collaborative process between patients and doctors.
The New Yorker features a fascinating piece entitled, "Stung," which explores a devastating problem now known as Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). What does CCD have to do with health (other than that of the poor bees)? It turns out that honeybees are essential to modern, commercial agriculture, which depends heavily on their pollination services. Many crops -- apples, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes, and pumpkins, to name just a few -- rely on honeybees to help produce sufficient yields.
Almonds, in particular, have extremely high pollination requirements--nearly all the flowers in an orchard must be cross-pollinated to produce a commercial crop--and so California's increasingly large (and lucrative) almond industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent; it is estimated that to service the state's two billion dollars' worth of almonds next year will require nearly 1.5 million hives, or roughly two-thirds of all the colonies that existed in this country before colony-collapse disorder. . . . Five years from now, as more acreage goes into production, it is expected that almonds will require 2.1 million colonies, or nearly all the hives that are currently being kept, both by commercial beekeepers and by hobbyists.
Unfortunately, CCD is taking a tremendous toll on the commercial bee population. It has been reported in thirty-six states, and some commercial beekeepers have reported losses of up to ninety per cent. A number of beekeeping businesses have already failed. This, in turn, has serious implications for the agriculture industry and our food supply. Finding alternative pollinators will be challenging, so crop yields will likely decline, and the availability and cost of healthy food will be affected.
Finally, consider this observation by author Elizabeth Kolbert and a quote from a report issued by the National Research Council on the subject:
[I]f it's a bad sign when an ecosystem loses its large mammals, it is probably an even worse sign when it can no longer support its insects. The report put it this way: "Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world."
What is our world coming to if we can't even keep our bees alive?