Health

Health

 

 

ECO HVAR'S AIMS: 

To initiate, organize, promote and encourage projects to improve health in all age groups.

HOW? 

- through projects of health education for all age groups, especially the young, with special focus on promoting good balance in diet, exercise, activities, rest, relaxation and healthy lifestyle habits.

- through projects for health tourism, especially promoting activity and sporting holidays, including nature walks, bicycling, sailing, rock climbing, rowing and other water sports.

- through co-operation with organizations having similar aims in Croatia and abroad

The 'Mediterranean diet' is considered to be extremely healthy, especially in protecting against heart disease. The first commercial genetically modified (GM) crops were planted in the United States in 1994 and have aroused heated controversy ever since. When GM meets the Mediterranean diet, are the two compatible? Or will GM swallow up the concept of the 'Mediterranean diet' and spit it out, unrecognizable and indigestible?

A major scientific study published in November 2016 confirmed the horrific damage cigarette smoking can cause to human health.  Cigarette smoking is associated with 17 different types of cancer and is estimated to claim more than 6 million lives each year.

In the age before tablets, mobile phones, computers and televisions, many people used to read, and reading was a social asset. Yes, it is so. We who are old enough remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when these wonders of modern living did not exist. Children brought up in this age of instant communication across continents often wonder what we did with our time. One thing was reading. Books, newspapers, journals, magazines and comics were the main sources of passing the time pleasurably and/or educationally.

Hvar is blessed in having a very good water supply. That said, piped water is not yet available across the whole island. The eastern villages between Jelsa and Sućuraj still rely on wells and cisterns filled by rainwater, although projects to connect them to the mains supply by stages are in hand, and have been since about 2010.

Some of the concepts underlying ECO HVAR for health.

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Eco Environment News feeds

  • UK Climate Change Committee voices concern over Scotland’s progress on decarbonising buildings and reliance on unproved technologies

    Scotland has finally produced realistic short-term plans on cutting its climate emissions, but there is “real concern” about the credibility of its overall strategy, the UK’s climate policy watchdog has found.

    Nigel Topping, the chair of the UK Climate Change Committee, said there were “flashing amber lights” about the quality and seriousness of some of the Scottish government’s medium- and long-term proposals to reach net zero by 2045.

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  • Researchers say solitary bottlenose has adapted well to city waters, but tighter controls on boat traffic and human behaviour are needed

    Italian scientists monitoring the movements of a dolphin in the Venice lagoon have said humans are the ones who need managing, rather than wildlife.

    Known as Mimmo, the bottlenose dolphin has been spotted on several occasions since it made its first appearance in June last year, prompting a research team from the University of Padova to spring into action.

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  • Fish levels fall by 7.2% with as little as 0.1C of warming per decade, northern hemisphere research shows

    Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.

    Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.

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  • Thousands more people across Devon and Cornwall could join case against water firm

    A group legal claim against South West Water alleging sewage pollution into coastal waters is harming businesses and individuals has been expanded across Devon and Cornwall.

    Thousands more individuals could now join the first environmental community group legal action against a water company over the impact of sewage pollution.

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  • Walthamstow Wetlands, London: They’re professional skulkers, loud but highly elusive. And yet there one is, out of the reeds, to be remembered for ever

    It’s weather you’d emigrate to avoid. Gloomy and cold – Tupperware sky and drizzle in the air. But tranquil, at least. Small mercies. Walthamstow Wetlands – a 211-hectare nature reserve centred on 10 reservoirs in north-east London. Jewel in the Lee Valley’s crown, and as good a place for waterbirds as any in the capital.

    Six tufted ducks drift across – a posse of monochrome floaters on a mission to nowhere. A little grebe – floating powder puff – does its trademark jump-and-dive, surfacing 30 seconds later, 25 yards to the left of where I expected. Extreme peace descends on me. Birdfulness, the best way to be.

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  • Volunteer group Citizens of the Reef made the find as part of the Great Reef Census

    Citizen scientists have discovered what they believe is one of the largest coral colonies ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef.

    The coral spans approximately 111 metres in maximum length and covers an estimated area of 3,973 sq m – about half the size of a soccer field.

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  • Researchers discover rare periods of a few thousands years when climate unexpectedly awoke from slumber

    During the ”snowball Earth” period about 700m years ago, Earth’s climate shut down. The planet was encased in ice and insulated from seasonal variations: spring, summer, autumn and winter all stopped. Or at least that was the theory.

    Recent examination of some ancient rocks from the west coast of Scotland has now overturned that thinking, suggesting there were periods during snowball Earth when the climate woke up.

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  • He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years

    Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing. In fact, he was arguably the bridge between the San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and present-day Silicon Valley: in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs eulogised the Whole Earth Catalog and Brand’s philosophy, and echoed its farewell mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

    You could say that Brand has also lived big and long. He is now 87 years old, in the final chapters of an eventful and adventurous life that has crossed paths with some of the most consequential events and figures of his era. He has been a writer, an editor, a publisher, a soldier, a photojournalist, an LSD evangelist, an events organiser, a future-planning consultant, even a government adviser (to the California governor Jerry Brown in the late 70s). “There was a time when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I find things and I found things,’” says Brand, as in he is a founder. He is speaking from a library where he likes to work in Petaluma, California, not far from his houseboat in Sausalito. “I’m always searching for good stuff to recommend, and good people.”

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  • Armed groups and a state-owned refinery’s oil leaks have displaced Barrancabermeja’s fishing community and poisoned a paradise once full of manatees and jaguars

    Standing on her wooden canoe, a machete in her hand, Yuly Velásquez hacks away at reeds matted with blackened sludge. Close by, a burst oil pipe has released a slick of crude into the San Silvestre wetlands in Barrancabermeja, Colombia’s oil city, choking the water and its wildlife.

    “The destruction is immense,” says Velásquez, president of Fedepesan, a sustainable fishing organisation. “For the fish, the animals and flora, it means immediate death.”

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  • The Belgian ceremony attracts beekeepers from the Netherlands, France and Germany keen to boost dark bee numbers and stop the spread of the hybrid honeybee

    Every summer, 1,000 virgin queens descend on the Belgian town of Chimay. During the “wedding flight”, a male attaches to the female. His endophallus (penis equivalent) is torn off and he falls to the ground and dies. Mission accomplished.

    Beekeepers come and pick up their fertilised queens in small colourful hives, driving them back home, sometimes more than 300km away. They will use the genetic material gathered in south Belgium to build new colonies in the Netherlands, France and Germany.

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