Abstract
Based on the Vernadsky idea of the leading role of living matter in the geochemical organization of the biosphere and its human transformation into noosphere in the interest of Homo sapiens, we show that widely spread endemic diseases of geochemical origin can be spatially identified through the study of the two-layer (natural and technogenic) geochemical structure of modern noosphere. Develo** the assumption that many endemic diseases are related to the discrepancy between the metabolic demand in chemical elements formed in species in the course of evolution and their current elements consumption through local food chains, which is defined by the interference of natural and anthropogenic geochemical conditions, we investigated the distribution of thyroid cancer cases in areas subjected to radioactive contamination due to the Chernobyl accident. The results showed that the spatial distribution of the disease is most pronounced in areas where radioactive contamination overlays iodine-deficient soils. We presume that the developed methods for detecting endemic diseases of geochemical nature can help identify and prevent many modern dangerous diseases.
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Acknowledgements
I thank my colleagues Victor Berezkin, Lyudmila Kolmykova and Vladimir Baranchukov for assistance in field and laboratory work and data handling. I am grateful to Boris Ryzhenko and Sergey Romanov for productive discussion and Ivan Kryshev for valuable comments. The work is conducted under the GEOKHI RAS state assignment. This work was partly funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and Belorussian Republican Foundation for Basic Research (grant #20-55-00012).
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Korobova, E.M. (2023). Peculiarities of the Geochemical Organization of the Modern Noosphere and Methods of Its Study for Detection of Endemic Diseases of Geochemical Nature. In: Kolotov, V.P., Bezaeva, N.S. (eds) Advances in Geochemistry, Analytical Chemistry, and Planetary Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09883-3_26
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