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REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Disaster and Emergency Medicine
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1547784
This article is part of the Research Topic Global Health and Warfare: Assessing the Broad Impacts of Conflict on Public Health View all 12 articles
The Impacts of War on Health, Human Rights, and the Environment --An Overview
Provisionally accepted- School of Medicine, Tufts University, Boston, United States
War adversely affects health, violates human rights, and contaminates the environment. Direct health impacts of war result mainly from explosive weapons. Indirect health impacts of war, which often occur more frequently than the direct impacts, are primarily due to damage to civilian infrastructure and forced displacement of populations. These indirect impacts include malnutrition, communicable diseases, exacerbation of noncommunicable diseases, maternal and infant disorders, and mental and behavioral disorders. In most many wars, there is widespread violation of human rights and international humanitarian law. War and the preparation for war contaminates air, water, and land, resulting inincreasing the risk of increased adverse health effects. Health professionals can have play major roles to play in providing medical care to victims of war, documenting and performing research on the health impacts of war, educating and raising awareness, and advocating for policies and programs to prevent war and build sustainable peace.
Keywords: War, Armed conflict, Public Health, Disease, Human Rights, environment, prevention malnutrition, Communicable Diseases
Received: 18 Dec 2024; Accepted: 14 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Levy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Barry S. Levy, School of Medicine, Tufts University, Boston, United States
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