Collaborative on Health and the Environment

Environmental Influences on Neurodevelopment workshop materials available

1/19/12: CHE and the Autism Society recently co-sponsored three workshops featuring national experts from diverse sectors who highlighted the latest research on associations between environmental exposures and early neurodevelopment as well as the implications for prevention-based public health policy. These workshops were intended to catalyze cross-discipline discussions among leaders in environmental, experimental and epidemiologic fields as well as those involved in public policy and environmental health advocacy.

Speaker presentation slides are being added to the workshop's webpage and audio from the workshop is now available.
Visit the workshop webpage

New AARP blog on healthy aging and the environment

1/10/12: AARP has just launched a blog on Healthy Aging and the Environment, which can be found on the AARP website. This inaugural piece links to a number of resources that can help educate AARP's 35 million members on environmental influences on health including the report Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging (see CHE's Healthy Aging Initiative webpage).

You can help ensure this becomes a regular weekly AARP blog. Visit the site, post a comment to the blog, "like" it on Facebook, Twitter it, etc. to show widespread support for this pivotal new initiative by AARP. If this is successful and AARP continues to reach out to their members with critical information on environmental influences on healthy aging, then many more highly influential people will have the science they need to promote healthy environments across generations.

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

CHE regularly highlights the work of our Partners here in our Partner Spotlight.

Building for Health: A Talk with Richard Jackson, MD, MPH
Interview by Steve Heilig, MPH
January 2012

How does where we live impact our health? It’s a big and complex question, but Richard Jackson, MD, MPH is leading the way towards answers--and interventions.

Jackson is a longtime leading figure in public health. Trained in pediatrics at UCSF and public health at UC Berkeley, he is currently Professor and Chairman of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA’s School of Public Health. Prior to that he has been California’s State Health Officer and Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health. He is a founding CHE partner who has participated in many of CHE's conference calls, meetings, and initiatives.

Over the past decade much of Jackson’s focus has been on the "built environment"—our homes, cities, streets, institutions—affect our health. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects and has written and spoken extensively in this arena. He has both recent books and a new television series titled “Designing Health Communities”, which premieres on PBS in February and is available on DVD. Episodes in the 4-part series include “Retrofitting Suburbia”, “Rebuilding Places of the Heart,” “Social Policy in Concrete,” and “Searching for Shangri-La.” Such titles might lead one to suspect Dr. Jackson is a man with his head in the clouds, but he remains a pragmatist who is able to retain lofty goals in terms of healthy futures.

3 Feb High levels of mercury found in Minnesota's North Shore babies. One in 10 babies along Minnesota's North Shore are born with unhealthy levels of mercury in their bodies, according to a new report on contamination around Lake Superior, the first to look for the pollutant in the blood of U.S. infants. Minneapolis Star Tribune.

3 Feb How the Sierra Club took millions from the natural gas industry ?�and why it stopped. Mainstream environmental groups have struggled to balance local concerns about traditional pollution with planet-sized worries over climate change, and how to work with corporate America without being seen as selling out. Time Magazine.

3 Feb Scientists censure McGill University over ties to asbestos industry. Dozens of prominent medical researchers and scientists from across Canada and around the world have signed a letter demanding that McGill University sever its ties with the asbestos industry. Montreal Gazette.

3 Feb Poor, minority residents face most health risks with climate change. Poor, urban and minority residents are most at risk for health problems linked to climate change, according to a new California Department of Public Health analysis of Los Angeles and Fresno counties. California Watch.

3 Feb Filmmaker sounds alarm over ocean of plastic. On Midway atoll in the North Pacific, dozens of young albatross lie dead on the sand, their stomachs filled with plastic objects their parents have mistaken for food. That surreal sight, says film director Craig Leeson, is one of the many symptoms of a plague afflicting the world's oceans, food chains and human communities: the onslaught of discarded plastic. Agence France-Presse.

3 Feb Movement to banish copper from brake pads gains momentum. While government has been preoccupied with fuel economy, what about smaller environmental causes like mercury in car switches and lead weight wheel balances? Add to these copper brake pads, which produce metal dust that environmental advocates say reaches waterways and harms aquatic life. New York Times.

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