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This pilot project focused on the assessment of indoor air quality at a local high school in Galveston, Texas, using methods based on guidelines for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools program. Tools for Schools, developed for evaluating and ensuring acceptable air quality for schools, takes a low-cost, minimal-involvement, primarily educational approach. The authors also compared the findings from this approach with the results of an air-sampling program. The overall goal was to determine if use of Tools for Schools was sufficient to identify conditions with the potential to cause adverse health effects. The primary objectives were to 1) establish an indoor air quality committee for the school to implement Tools for Schools assessments and management strategies, 2) collect air quality data in high-risk areas identified within the school by the indoor air quality committee, 3) collect outdoor air quality data at or in close proximity to the school, and 4) develop methods and instruments for assessing environmental risks associated with daily school attendance. Data were gathered on levels of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ozone, particulate matter ([PM.sub.10]), mold, relative humidity, and temperature. Data values for each sampled pollutant were compared with federal standards, recommended values established by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists for non-industrial populations, and effects screening levels developed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Levels of all VOCs except formaldehyde were found to be well within guidelines, as were ozone and particulate-matter levels. Mold, however, was widespread, including both common species and species associated with allergy and asthma, such as Aspergillus and Alternaria. In general, Tools for Schools provides an excellent foundation for a school indoor air quality program, although the authors did find it necessary to streamline data collection and did find that mold with the potential for adverse health effects was present, albeit not visible in some areas., Introduction This pilot project was developed to address indoor air quality (IAQ) at a local high school in Galveston, Texas. The authors sought to establish an indoor air quality program [...]

Planning for environmental health management of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games included assessment of the capacity and deficiencies of relevant public health agencies in Athens and the other four Olympic cities with 17 detailed questionnaires. Different estimates of the expected number of visitors were made on the basis of experience from previous Olympic Games. Potential public health risks were identified and prioritized. A number of deficiencies in personnel, resources, training, and coordination were identified in most agencies. One hundred and ninety-six environmental health inspectors were expected to work during the Olympic period. Around 18,000 athletes and escorts from 201 countries were expected to participate in the Olympic Games and 7,000 to participate in the Para-Olympic Games. Three different scenarios regarding the number of expected visitors were explored; the most probable estimate being 1,950,000 visitors. Foodborne diseases, waterborne diseases, and heat-related illnesses were considered of high priority during the Olympic period, as were traffic accidents. The Olympic Games are a difficult assignment that demands extensive planning, appropriate resources, and timely reporting and coordination among the various public health agencies., Introduction The Athens 2004 summer Olympic Games were expected to be the largest event in Greek and world sporting history and one of the greatest challenges the various public health [...]

Since the release of Australia's first State of the Environment (SoE) report, a variety of physical environmental indicators have been determined for each SoE environmental management theme (the atmosphere, water (inland, estuarine and sea), the land, biodiversity, heritage and human settlement). While monitoring these physical themes is fundamental to environmental protection, there are opportunities to expand SoE reporting within the broader context of sustainable development. Indicators of social welfare, equity and human health all have environmental components, both in terms of cause and effect. This has been recognised in the 1999 National Environmental Health Strategy which recommends the identification of indicators of environmental hazard, human health outcomes and environmental management processes to ameliorate these. Illustrating the effects of environmental degradation in terms of human health can increase community awareness of the relevance of environmental management or protection approaches. This article attempts to define a preliminary set of population health environmental indicators (PHEIs) that could be incorporated into SoE indicator sets. Such human health indicators can be used both as measures of environmental quality, as well as to illustrate how environmental degradation impacts on human health and quality of life. All indicators are developed from routinely collected health data sources to enable trend monitoring. Some examples are given of typical PHEIs produced for use within a NSW regional area.

Desertification is a global issue, and can be stopped when technology and science are combined in a global effort. Essential initiatives include a drought early-warning system, international research centers for desertification, and global effort to develop water resource technologies.

The towns of Comfrey and St. Peter in Minnesota were devastated by two tornadoes on Mar 29, 1998. The Brown-Nicollet Environmental Health Dept played a significant role in the towns' recovery from the damages of the storm. Despite hindrances to the operation such as the department's workload, limited funds and the gravity of the disaster, the department was able to respond to the needs of the devastated communities., Introduction On Sunday, March 29, 1998, tornadoes spawned by a supercell laid waste to 100 miles of urban and rural areas in five counties in south-central Minnesota. Two tornadoes, classified [...]

Scientists from the Georgia Division of Public Health describe the ongoing public health activities during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The Public Health Command Center was created to coordinate all public health issues and responses. This included enforcing all regulations regarding food services, solid waste, swimming pools and water supplies. Over 300 environmentalists conducted thousands of inspections of food vendors, portable toilets and waste collection sites. Stations throughout each venue gave spectators hats, water, sunscreen and advice about preventing heat-related illness., Extensive planning and preparation by public health agencies were required for The provision of public health services during the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, which brought together more than 10 000 athletes from 197 countries and more than 2 million visitors. Public health activities included the development and use of an augmented surveillance system to monitor health conditions and detect disease outbreaks; creation and implementation of 6 environmental health regulations; establishment of a central Public Health Command Center and response teams to coordinate response to public health emergencies planning for potential mass casualties and the provision of emergency medicaL services; implementation of strategies for the prevention of heat-related illness; and distribution of health promotion and disease prevention information. Public health agencies should take the lead in organizing and implementing a system for preventing and managing public health issues at future large-scale public events such as the Olympics. JAMA 1998;279:1469-1473

Local environmental health programs (EHPs) in North America are operating in an environment that is undergoing fundamental social, political, and scientific change. This paper describes a project undertaken in Alberta, Canada to strengthen and improve the ability of local EHPs to protect the public from environmental hazards. This project was undertaken by a multidisciplinary team from the University of Alberta under the direction of local EHP and provincial health department staff. Strengths and weaknesses of existing EHPs were examined using input from internal and external stake-holders. This input was solicited through surveys of and discussions with local health unit staff; focus group sessions with representatives of the general public; and discussions with senior officials of government departments whose staff related to local environmental health programs. Based on this assessment, existing program strengths which should be retained and necessary program re-alignments were identified. A reference model for local EHPs, which could be adapted to specific needs, was developed consisting of the following elements: An environmental health vision statement; a mission statement; a scope statement; a statement of principles and values; and a program design framework with outcome, process, and structure components. The reference model was refined through discussion with provincial stake-holders and with environmental health experts in Canada and other countries. Recommendations to facilitate the implementation of the model were made in the areas of legislation, funding, management, technical and support services, and professional training and development., Introduction Alberta, the second-most westerly province of Canada, has a population of about 2.5 million. Traditionally, local environmental health programs (EHPs) in Alberta have resided in twenty-seven local public health [...]

Local environmental health programs in North America and Europe are currently ricing several challenges. Among these is the need to demonstrate their effectiveness in improving the health status of the community they serve. There are serious limitations to the use of traditional health status measures to evaluate the impact of local environmental health programs, including the long lag period between many hazardous environmental exposures and ill-health, and the unresponsive nature of many environmentally-related diseases to local environmental health program interventions. As part of a project to design a contemporary model for the delivery of local environmental health services in Alberta, a systematic framework for developing objectives for use by local environmental health programs was constructed. The framework involves the sequential development of health status, risk-reduction, process and structure objectives. It is envisaged that the comprehensive package of objectives developed using this framework will be adapted by individual local environmental health programs to their own circumstances and used for directing program activities and for monitoring their effectiveness. In this article we describe the framework for development and the scope of these objectives, the structure of individual objectives and how local environmental health programs can adapt these for their own use., Introduction The National Environmental Health Association (1) in the U.S.A., the Audit Commission in Great Britain (2), and the authors of a study commissioned by Alberta Health (3) all recommended [...]

Public health policy can play a major role in pioneering strategies for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Individual behavior change must go hand-in-hand with changes throughout the community. Recent focus has been on major risk factors, including smoking, lack of exercise, and nutrition. By adopting community changes, better results may be realized than information and skill building alone. For example, food in school cafeterias could become healthier and lower in fats. Direct municipal support for tax penalties on high-fat food may create lasting changes, such as the removal of candy machines. Scandinavian countries, such as Finland, have been successful in converting to healthier eating habits that lowered the rate of heart disease. Many sources are suitable for targeting a healthier lifestyle. These include higher pricing of alcohol or cigarettes to discourage youth from forming early habits and counter-advertising.

Recent years have seen considerable progress in integrating environmental concerns into the mainstream of development policy and planning. Economic instruments designed explicitly for environmental purposes may help to achieve cost-effective solutions, and generate public revenues. Macroeconomic and sectoral policies may impact heavily upon the environment, and there is much scope for policy reforms that are justified in both economic and environmental terms. Progress in this area has been much more rapid than in the case of health objectives, even though the rationale for environmental improvement is often ultimately related to human health and well-being. It is proposed that lessons from recent experience in the use of economic instruments and policies to achieve environmental objectives are highly relevant for the health sector, which should seek and encourage support for measures that require consumers and producers of environmentally degrading products to pay for the economic and social costs of the damage resulting from their use. Policy reform at the macroeconomic or sectoral level may yield cost-effective solutions to some health problems, and may even bring about improvements in health status that involve no net cost at all. The countrywide impact of such policies indicate that health agencies, including WHO, should develop the capacity to understand how economic policies and the adjustment process impact upon human health, not only directly through the effect on incomes, but also indirectly, via changes in the natural environment. Ability to conduct rigorous health impact assessment of economic policy reform, which requires a multidisciplinary effort, is a necessary condition if health ministries are to maximize their effectiveness in influencing overall government economic policy., Economic instruments for environmental management Recent developments in the application of environmental economics are relevant to the health sector, especially considering the structural adjustment processes that are under way in [...]

Environmental health and protection practitioners have set several priority challenges to ensure a quality environmental for the 21st century. These challenges are building and travelling bridges, defining the field, organization and programmatic diversity, mission performance, programming for priorities, risk assessment, risk communication, competencies for practitioners, continuing education, primacy of prevention, creative financing, action for environmental policy and leadership., Editor's Note: Larry Gordon, Visiting Professor for the School of Public Administration at the University of New Mexico and 1961 Mangold Award recipient delivered this keynote presentation to the California [...]

A classification system for risk communication can serve two major purposes: it provides a practical guide to techniques and establishes a framework for further development. By using traditional models of communication elements and management operations, this taxonomy has the advantage of being more readily adapted to the needs of environmental health professionals. Like all taxonomies, it should be continually revised and expanded by the professionals who use it., Many excellent references are available for risk communication training (1-5), but practitioners are also interested in summaries of these techniques. This paper presents a taxonomy of risk communication to help [...]

Considerable attention has focused on farming practices and behavioral patterns that characterize Amish farmers from other agriculturalists. It has been suggested that Amish farmers are more concerned about the physical environment than non-Amish farmers because Amish employ fewer technology-intensive farming practices, though there is little empirical evidence to support such an assertion. To address this issue, data were collected from a sample of Amish and non-Amish owner-operators in Ohio to compare environmental attitudes and farming systems presently in use. Discriminant analysis was used to examine factors chosen to differentiate the two groups. Findings reveal that Amish respondents believed more strongly than other farmers that ground water pollution was an important environmental problem and that farmers should reduce chemical application rates to protect ground water resources. Other farmers exhibited greater willingness to participate in educational programs designed to reduce pesticide application rates. The two groups could not be differentiated by criteria used to make adoption decisions about farm technologies and farming practices; both used productivity and efficiency criteria when making adoption decisions.

This paper presents trends that are shaping the future workplace so that environmental health managers can anticipate these changes, understand their impact and enhance their capacity for wiser decision-making. As we move from an industrial society to a post-industrial society in this high tech age, the workforce will include more women, more minorities, more service jobs, more training/education alliances, more legal concerns and more strategies to control spending. Corporate cultures will place more emphasis on human capital as a strategic resource in this third-wave world, or world of information.

Quantitative Risk Assessments (QRA) are increasingly shaping the foundation for environmental health policy and regulatory decisions including the setting of priorities and the ranking of relative toxicities of a large number of chemicals. The reliability and validity of the QRA procedure is limited by a lack of data about a range of biological, chemical and physical processes that determine exposure and health effects.

The need for physicians trained in occupational and environmental medicine is addressed in this article, and strategies for recruiting such specialists are explored. Diseases caused or adversely affected by factors in the environment and workplace are expensive because of the direct and indirect costs, yet, in general, the issues of occupational and environmental disease are not sufficiently recognized. Traditionally in the US, occupational medicine has been the province of graduates of schools of public health; only recently has a clinical specialty in this area been established. Environmental medicine has barely come that far. Practitioners in these areas need to understand how to obtain information concerning occupational exposure and how to diagnose diseases that could result from such exposures. A partial list of these diseases, each associated with certain types of work, includes lung cancer, leukemia, asthma, chronic bronchitis, disorders of the nervous system, kidney failure, and high blood pressure. Specialists need to have broad training in several areas, such as toxicology, industrial hygiene, biostatistics, and epidemiology. As many as 5,500 physicians are needed in occupational and environmental medicine and recruiting them should be of highest priority. The basic approaches to recruitment should include increasing interest in the field; establishing centers where physicians can receive excellent training; integrating environmental medicine with occupational medicine; increasing funding for academic programs and faculty support; financing graduate training; and establishing methods of certification and accreditation of specialists in occupational and environmental medicine. Each of these goals is discussed in detail, with suggestions on how to accomplish them. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)

Long-term, sustainable Third World and international development can be achieved only through new forms of cooperation among national governments, international agencies, private enterprise, and environmental, educational, religious and humanitarian organizations.

Prior to September 11--People involved in environmental health worried that they were unprepared to respond to a catastrophe in their community involving terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. September 11 [...]

RIDDING A SCHOOL of all the contaminants and hazards inherent in any building is tantamount to enclosing it in a bubble. But armed with the proper knowledge and tools for [...]

Many questions regarding environmental health decision making remain unanswered. These issues include decision making on the use of alternatives to chlorination in drinking water to avoid the risk of cancer, the possible health effects of exposure to residential electric and magnetic field and the effectiveness of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Decisions should be based on research findings. However, this approach will produce better results if there are no communication barriers between scientists and decision makers., Introduction In 1965, the British statistician Sir Austin Bradford Hill commented, "All scientific work is incomplete - whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be [...]

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) introduces a new translational research framework that builds upon previous biomedical models to create a more comprehensive and integrated environmental health paradigm. The framework was developed as a graphical construct that illustrates the complexity of designing, implementing, and tracking translational research in environmental health. We conceptualize translational research as a series of concentric rings and nodes, defining 'translation' as movement either from one ring to another or between nodes on a ring. A 'Fundamental Questions' ring expands upon the research described in other frameworks as 'basic' to include three interrelated concepts critical to basic science research: research questions, experimental settings, and organisms. This feature enables us to capture more granularity and thus facilitates an approach for categorizing translational research and its growth over time. We anticipate that the framework will help researchers develop compelling long-term translational research stories and accelerate public health impacts by clearly mapping out opportunities for collaborations. By using this paradigm, researchers everywhere will be better positioned to design research programs, identify research partners based on cross-disciplinary research needs, identify stakeholders who are likely to use the research for environmental decision-making and intervention, and track progress toward common goals., Background and Objective Embedded in the mission of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is the goal of encouraging the translation of research from basic biomedical and environmental [...]

Introduction The following article is reprinted in its entirety from The New Zealand Journal of Environmental Health, Vol. 14, No. 4, the official journal of the New Zealand Institute of [...]

As environmental health confronts new challenges and pursues new directions it appears that the field may be diverging from the parent endeavor and profession of public health. If the objectives, orientation and operations of environmental health are increasingly different from those of public health, it can be argued that this should be reflected organizationally by withdrawing environmental health from public health and establishing an independent and autonomous local institution for environmental issues. This paper considers the wisdom and viability of this viewpoint by assessing the common basis and interests of environmental and public health, the erosion of public health as a contributor to environmental health's increasing disenfranchisement, and shared challenges confronting the fields. Historical, cultural, political, epidemiological and demographic factors are considered. Analysis does not support organizational division of environmental and public health. Diminished scientific, public health practice, policy formulation and advocacy capabilities may result. Consideration is given to strategies for renewing environmental health's old ties to public health as new directions are cultivated.

Environmental health services have been affected markedly by a wide range of scientific, social, economic and political developments. The future environmental health specialist will require a strong background in the basic environmental health sciences as well as highly developed management and administrative skills. He or she will need the capacity to conduct policy analysis and to reason scientifically and rigorously in relation to environmental health issues as well as social and economic trends that may impact on environmental conditions.

Peru's expanding population and rapid urbanization--a result of migration to its largest cities--have stressed the country's public services infrastructure and the provision of public health and environmental health services. In response, the Ministry of Health established the General Directorate of Environmental Health (DIGESA), the branch charged with assuring adequate environmental health services to populations in rural and urban areas. The magnitude of the environmental health problems in peri-urban settlements, however, has exceeded the capacity of DIGESA to respond. The Urban Environmental Health Project is an effort to develop the ability of local communities to address these problems

A major objective of the International Federation of Environmental Health (IFEH) is to promote international communication among environmental health professionals. IFEH is an international trade association whose members are national [...]

[less than]www.epa.gov/payt[greater than] At this site, U.S. EPA offers information for local officials considering pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) programs for their communities. U.S. EPA also is offering a free PAYT training video. [...]

To help local officials decide if a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) program is right for their communities, U.S. EPA has developed a series of PAYT products and tools. A recent addition to [...]

Description: Works with the Vice President of Health and Safety Regulatory Affairs to develop, implement, and administer programs, policies and activities in the areas of public health and safety; scientific [...]

Karen Paterson, 1999 sabbatical exchange winner from London, England, will need friendly hosts to visit with from the United States. Any NEHA members interested in sharing a few hours of [...]

In 1998, the deaths of six participants in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race brought the International Year of the Ocean to a dismal end in Australia. The race continued […]

Hi! I'm Dick Pantages, and I have the pleasure of representing you and the environmental health profession as the president of NEHA for the next year. Who Is He? I [...]