ABSTRACT
Rainforest ecosystems are the icon and the symbol of concern about biodiversity and planet ‘health’, and indeed, they are critically important in global ecology. The total surface covered by rainforests is 11 million square kilometres, the equivalent of South America (or 8 per cent of the global land mass), and 200 million inhabitants (or 3.3 per cent of the world’s population) live in such areas. However, only 12 million people, or 0.2 per cent of humanity, directly live from tropical forest products, a very low proportion compared with, for instance, the world’s savannah areas. In some human societies, forests are considered dangerous places full of evil. The Hindi word jangal (‘jungle’), for instance, means ‘uninhabited world’. In Latin, the words for ‘forest’ (silva) and ‘savage’ have the same root, and foris, which gave us ‘forest’, means ‘outside, remote’ (and forasticus, ‘wild’). Referring to Africa, Zerner (2003) invented the concept of ‘viral forests’, full of new threats. Yet paradise is often imagined as a luxuriant, moist and warm landscape, and some great civilizations, like the Maya in Mexico, the Khmer in Cambodia and the people of Borobudur in Java, built their achievements in rainforests (Diamond, 2005). The tropical forest environment thus carries an ambivalent image, and this chapter considers the health issues related to life in such an environment.
