New Website Connects Agriculture and Public Health

The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) has launched a website to enable research on the critical links between agriculture and public health. The Agriculture & Public Health Gateway is a unique information resource for public health and agricultural professionals, advocacy and community organizations, policymakers, journalists and educators.

“Public health and agriculture are intricately linked, and there is a growing interest in the complicated connections between them,” said CLF Director Dr. Robert Lawrence. “The Gateway places important and reliable information about these connections in one central location and makes it easy to access. We hope all who are concerned about a sustainable food system and about improving the health of the public will benefit from this resource.”

The main purposes of the Gateway are to:

• Inform those who want to learn about the connections between public health and agriculture
• Strengthen the capacity of communities, organizations and the media to access reliable information on these topics
• Connect communities, organizations and individuals to facilitate knowledge sharing and open a collaborative dialogue.

There are several ways to find information on the Gateway site. Visitors can browse by subject to find reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, relevant organizations and other research tools. The Gateway’s powerful database search provides access to millions of resources related to agriculture and public health. This search tool simultaneously links Gateway users to databases from the National Library of Medicine (PubMed), the National Agricultural Library (AGRICOLA), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (National Agricultural Safety Database) and the World Resources Institute (EarthTrends).

Other Gateway resources include links to glossaries, listservs and newsletters, online photos and images, and event listings related to agriculture and public health.

Individuals can register for free as a member of the Gateway to bookmark articles and other materials, save search histories, email articles, sign up for related RSS feeds and share information with others through del.icio.us and DiggIt!