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Editorial Priorities
Pollution and Diseases is an interdisciplinary journal committed to the study of environmental contamination and its complex relationships with human, animal, and ecosystem health. The journal welcomes submissions across a broad range of scientific, medical, ecological, and historical perspectives.
At the same time, the journal identifies several editorial priority areas that reflect particularly urgent, underexplored, or societally significant challenges arising from pollution-related processes. These priorities guide editorial initiatives, thematic discussions, and special collections, but do not restrict the scope of topics considered for publication.
Relationship to the Discussions Section
Editorial priority areas serve as a conceptual foundation for the journal’s Discussions section.Topics identified as editorial priorities may be developed into structured scientific discussions, bringing together core research articles, critical commentaries, and responses that collectively address unresolved or contested questions.
The Discussions section provides a dedicated space for sustained scholarly exchange within these priority areas, while remaining open to new and emerging themes as scientific understanding evolves.
Editorial Perspective
The identification of editorial priorities reflects the journal’s recognition that the scale and consequences of human-induced environmental damage necessitate focused scientific attention. These priorities are dynamic and may evolve in response to emerging evidence, environmental crises, and global health challenges.
Important Note on Scope
While priority areas inform editorial planning and thematic initiatives, Pollution and Diseases remains fully open to high-quality submissions addressing any aspect of pollution and disease that meets the journal’s scientific and ethical standards.
1. Freshwater as a Priority Theme of the Journal
… freshwater degradation should be understood not as a linear decline in “quality,” but as a restructuring of environments, where new and insufficiently studied states can arise, including states with unexpected infectious properties.
DISCUSSIONS - DETAILS
The journal Pollution and Diseases considers freshwater issues to be one of its priority thematic areas. Problems related to freshwater are clearly intensifying. They manifest in multiple forms and are often region-specific, shaped by local geochemistry, infrastructure histories, climatic regimes, and patterns of industrial and agricultural pressure. Nature seems to be improvising its own kind of jazz, producing novel responses to decades of anthropogenic pollution. In the United States, freshwater-related challenges take one form; in southern Africa, they may be entirely different. Yet even this comparison is incomplete: in many regions the same stressors generate divergent outcomes because freshwater systems are not merely conduits of water, but complex ecological media with their own internal dynamics, thresholds, and feedbacks. The full geographical diversity of emerging freshwater problems has yet to be comprehensively understood, and the scientific vocabulary for describing these emerging configurations remains, in many respects, underdeveloped.
Much remains to be discovered in the study of this topic. The issue is no longer limited to the stable provision of populations with high-quality drinking water—this stage has already been passed. Freshwater now appears as an arena in which multiple crises converge: chemical contamination, microbial transformations, sediment remobilization, infrastructure aging, climate-driven hydrological volatility, and governance failures that are often invisible until their biological consequences become irreversible. The situation with freshwater is far worse and far more complex. What has occurred is an intrusion into a natural system of extraordinary complexity—one that functions through multi-scale interactions among chemical signals, biological adaptation, and ecological regulation. In this sense, freshwater degradation should be understood not as a linear decline in “quality,” but as a restructuring of environments, where new and insufficiently studied states can arise, including states with unexpected infectious properties.
2. Military Activity and Soils: Long-Term Environmental Consequences
The Priority Research Areas of the journal Pollution and Diseases define long-term, structurally significant directions of research at the intersection of environmental pollution and human health. One of these priorities concerns the effects of military activity on soils as a global and historically persistent process. Warfare alters soil systems through mechanical disturbance, chemical contamination, and biological disruption, producing consequences that extend far beyond the duration of armed conflict. This research area is not limited to specific regions or events and invites interdisciplinary contributions addressing soils as archives of anthropogenic pressure, sources of ecological risk, and determinants of long-term environmental and public health outcomes.