Which Integration for Health? Comparing Integrative Approaches for Epidemiology

The emergence of integrative approaches to the study of population health and the environment has yielded several new concepts, framing relations between health and the environment and defining different modes of integration in epidemiology and biomedicine. In this chapter, I discuss the relations between these concepts and data integration, as the ensemble of data practices aimed at using different types and bodies of data for the study of specific phenomena. I analyse three concepts in this direction: the exposome, a notion aimed at capturing all the exposures that individuals and populations experience; planetary health, a conceptualisation of the impact of local and multispecies environments on human health; and global health, a concept aimed at framing the health of populations as the result of different social factors of different and diverse populations. The focus on data integration allows me to discuss concrete consequences and differences of these concepts at the methodological and epistemological level, identifying their assumptions and commitments, merits, and limitations.