Excerpt from the February 2007 CHE Newsletter, written by Julia Varshavsky, CHE-Fertility national coordinator

A packed auditorium of over 400 leading scientists, physicians, nurses, patient and community group representatives, government agency officials and others came together for three intensive days at the highly successful 2007 University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) - CHE Summit on Environmental Challenges to Reproductive Health and Fertility on January 28-30, 2007.

Colleagues gathered at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center to exchange the latest research around environmental contaminants and reproductive health, discuss how the science impacts public health, education, policy, and the health care system and explore mutual areas of collaboration among the diverse constituencies participating in the Summit.

Highlights of some of the cutting-edge science presented at the Summit included several presentations showing that low level exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals like Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Bisphenol-A may interfere with fetal development and cause health problems such as endometriosis, cancer, and infertility later in life, and that these health effects may be passed down to future generations, so that even the grandchildren of those initially exposed may also be affected.

Many participants commented that they found the science and sense of shared purpose that came out of the Summit to be compelling and inspirational. Dr. Russell S. Kirby, Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, called the Summit “a propitious beginning” and compared it to a 1970 Earth Day celebration that galvanized the entire Earth Day movement.

Under the outstanding leadership of Summit Co-Directors Alison Carlson, Facilitator of the CHE Fertility/Pregnancy Compromise Work Group, Dixie Horning, Executive Director of UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Research Scientist at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies (on sabbatical from US EPA), Summit Co-Chairs Dr. Philip R. Lee, Founding Chairman of CHE and Chancellor and Professor Emeritus at UCSF and Dr. Linda Giudice, Professor and Chair of UCSF’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, the Summit highlighted the department’s newly-created Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE), a venture that aims to model the principles of collaboration and integration of trans-disciplinary environmental reproductive health research with education, health care, and health advocacy (For more information about PRHE, please visit: http://prhe.ucsf.edu/prhe/).

CHE looks forward to a continued partnership with PRHE and UCSF, to expand on the building blocks set forth by the Summit, and to facilitate further collaboration among those interested in working on reproductive and environmental health. Proceedings of the Summit have now been published and can be found at http://prhe.ucsf.edu/prhe/.

To download the MP3 recording of the February 26, 2007 CHE Partnership Call that highlighted the Summit, please visit: http://www.healthandenvironment.org/articles/partnership_calls/884.