Abstract

EcoHealth is an emerging field whose premise is to positively influence the health and wellbeing of humans, animals and ecosystems globally. Ethical concepts and theories are used to reason for certain actions influencing humans, animals and the environment globally. The purpose of this study was twofold; a) to determine how and to what extent the terms “ethic, ethics, ethical” and 41 other ethics terms including 20 ethical theories are used in the academic Ecohealth literature and b) to investigate the geography of EcoHealth academic article authorships. A total of n=648 academic articles were downloaded from four academic databases that had the term “ecohealth” in the article title, article abstract, article keywords or in the journal title. A content analysis of the n=648 articles was performed using ATLAS-ti©, a qualitative analysis software. We found that only nine of the n=42 ethics keywords showed up in more than one percent of the 648 EcoHealth articles. Furthermore, we found that authors from n=70 countries from diverse geographical areas contributed to the n=648 EcoHealth academic articles. However, most of these contributions consisted of 1-3 articles whereby authors from the USA contributed 250 articles, which is equivalent to 38.5% of all the EcoHealth articles investigated. The majority of articles originated from the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe. Given that the field of EcoHealth is considered a global endeavor, it is problematic that the diversity of authorship is so limited geographically. Furthermore the lack of meaningful engagement with ethics terms and theories in the n=648 EcoHealth academic articles limits the global guidance on human-human, humananimal and human-environment relationships, which in turn impedes progress on the goals that the EcoHealth field is trying to accomplish.