You might think maps showing the distribution of diseases and deaths - or man's failure to exist in harmony with nature - are a new invention. You would be wrong.
In the ancient classic Master Lu's Spring And Autumn Annals, the sage Lu expressed similar ideas, observing: 'In places with too much light water there is to be found baldness and goitre; much heavy water brings a high incidence of swellings and dropsies . . .; where sweet waters abound there will be healthy people.' The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, also perceived a link between people's health and nature.
He observed people in north-facing cities, where fogs and mists abound, tended to suffer from pleurisy and tonsilitis.
Generations later, rapid advances in the field of epidemiology have helped doctors unravel many more elusive mysteries about diseases and their link with the environment: from cholera, to yellow fever, to cancers and AIDS.
When cholera struck Europe in the middle of the 19th century, a report produced by the British Board of Health included a map showing the districts badly hit by the epidemic to be 'in those parts of the town where there is a deficiency . . . of sewage, drainage and paving'.
In another outbreak, mortality maps gave new insights into the possible causes: that deaths had occurred near sites where infected clothes were destroyed and where victims were buried.
In the 1980s, scientists investigating the mysterious deaths of a group of young men in the United States traced the source to 'patient zero' - a sexually promiscuous homosexual airline steward.