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CHE Partner Genon Jensen: Helping People and Planet Through HEAL
 Executive Director, Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL)
Brussels, Belgium
I grew up on the plains of Nebraska, amid intensive agriculture and livestock production and an extended family of farmers who had a great love for the land.
Little did I know back then, as a teenager working a summer job in the corn fields, that I was being exposed without my consent to certain pesticides that could increase my risk of certain diseases, like Parkinson’s. This early life experience carved a space within my world view for environmental health issues.
My mother was an active and well-respected trade union representative, and her dedication to providing better jobs and health for people across the land laid the foundations for my own passion in social activism. I took this keen interest to Washington D.C., where I trained as a journalist and political scientist.
During my studies at George Washington University, I became fascinated by the differences between the United States and the ongoing construction of the European Union. This led me over to Brussels, Belgium, the heart of the EU – the new Washington DC of Europe.
In 2000, I was the director of the leading European public interest platform for health groups, the European Public Health Alliance (www.epha.org). We had an extremely active and growing environmental health working group. We realized that there were many environmental, consumer, health-affected and women’s groups as well as progressive scientists in Europe who wanted to work together to bring forth the science and advocate for more protective environmental policies.
Since our inception in 2003, HEAL has grown to become a broad alliance of more than 50 member organizations including patients’, women’s , health professionals’, academic and environmental groups across Europe.
A challenge we constantly face is the misrepresentation of science and strong lobbying by industry and other groups that aim to put economic interests ahead of environmental health arguments, and provide a lopsided view of the true costs of chemical contamination.
The EU chemicals policy reform, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals), was considerably watered down because of industry pressure, and the new European chemical agency lacks resources to make sure that an ambitious list of hazardous chemicals goes through the authorization process. This is an area where CHE scientific resources and CHE partners could greatly contribute over the coming years.
At HEAL, we are always very careful in ensuring that our publications are backed up with solid evidence and peer-reviewed science. This is how we have gained credibility and sometimes even engagement from conservative groups. Engaging new groups such as medical oncologists and otherwise conservative politicians around breast cancer and chemical contaminants is certainly one of the biggest successes of the Alliance so far.
Another area where we have been particularly, and to some extent unexpectedly, successful is our work with health-affected groups such as asthma sufferers, cancer charities and doctors in the context of pesticides policy. Through simple tools and policy briefings, HEAL has managed to mobilize them as advocates for a ‘healthier’ EU pesticides reform, a message that eventually seems to have won over economic competitiveness and agricultural productivity arguments.
As the partner of CHE in Europe, HEAL has benefited enormously from CHE’s wealth of expertise in the science behind much-needed preventive health policy developments. We have used CHE information material and consensus statements to frame several of our policy campaigns in Europe.
CHE Partnership Calls, listservs, newsletters and bilateral conversations with CHE members are always a source of great inspiration and motivation to achieve our common ultimate goal: a healthy planet for healthy people.
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