The EPA's Commitment to Children's Environmental Health: History and Current Challenges.

Children's environmental health (CEH) has a 25-year history at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), during which the agency has advanced CEH through research, policy, and programs that address children's special vulnerability to environmental harm. However, the Trump administration took many actions that weakened efforts to improve CEH. The actions included downgrading or ignoring CEH concerns in decision-making, defunding research, sidelining the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, and rescinding regulations that were written in part to protect children. To improve CEH, federal environmental statutes should be reviewed to ensure they are sufficiently protective. The administrator should ensure the EPA's children's health agenda encompasses the most important current challenges and that there is accountability for improvement. Guidance documents should be reviewed and updated to be protective of CEH and the federal lead strategy refocused on primary prevention. The Office of Children's Health Protection's historically low funding and staffing should be remedied. Finally, the EPA should update CEH data systems, reinvigorate the role of the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, and restore funding for CEH research that is aligned with environmental justice and regulatory decision-making needs. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(1):124-134. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306537).

Mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental justice in United States federal policy, 1980-2016 : Why, with much known, was little done?

Toxic chemicals - "toxicants" - have been studied and regulated as single entities, and, carcinogens aside, almost all toxicants, single or mixed and however altered, have been thought harmless in very low doses or very weak concentrations. Yet much work in recent decades has shown that toxicants can injure wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans following exposures previously expected to be harmless. Additional work has shown that toxicants can act not only individually and cumulatively but also collectively and even synergistically and that they affect disadvantaged communities inordinately - and therefore, as argued by reformers, unjustly. As late as December 2016, the last full month before the inauguration of a president promising to rescind major environmental regulations, the United States federal environmental-health establishment, as led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), had not developed coherent strategies to mitigate such risks, to alert the public to their plausibility, or to advise leadership in government and industry about their implications. To understand why, we examined archival materials, reviewed online databases, read internal industry communications, and interviewed experts. We confirmed that external constraints, statutory and judicial, had been in place prior to EPA's earliest interest in mixture toxicity, but we found no overt effort, certainly no successful effort, to loosen those constraints. We also found internal constraints: concerns that fully committing to the study of complex mixtures involving numerous toxicants would lead to methodological drift within the toxicological community and that trying to act on insights from such study could lead only to regulatory futility. Interaction of these constraints, external and internal, shielded the EPA by circumscribing its responsibilities and by impeding movement toward paradigmatic adjustment, but it also perpetuated scientifically dubious policies, such as those limiting the evaluation of commercial chemical formulations, including pesticide formulations, to only those ingredients said by their manufacturers to be active. In this context, regulators' disregard of synergism contrasted irreconcilably with biocide manufacturers' understanding that synergism enhanced lethality and patentability. In the end, an effective national response to mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental injustice did not emerge. In parallel, though, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which was less constrained, pursued with scientific investigation what the EPA had not pursued with regulatory action.

From Florence to fossil fuels: Nursing has always been about environmental health.

BACKGROUND: Since its founding, professional nursing has applied an environmental lens to healing. METHODS: This CANS 2020 Keynote article describes the history of nursing environmental science and nurses important contributions to the US Environmental Justice Movement. Starting with Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, which established Environmental Theory, the paper introduces key figures throughout nursing history who have studied and advocated for environmental health and justice. FINDINGS: The paper emphasizes that nursing has always been about environmental health and that, regardless of specialty or practice setting, all nurses are called to incorporate environmental science and translation into their research and practice. CONCLUSION: This call to action is especially critical today in the context of urgent issues like climate change, environmental racism and racial health disparities, emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, and chemical exposures in the home and workplace (among others).

In Nightingale's Footsteps-Individual to Global: From Nurse Coaches to Environmental and Civil Society Activists.

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the famous "lady with the lamp," is indeed the world's most well-known nurse. In our times, now for nearly six decades, the same environmental and social issues that were of concern to Nightingale are understood as key factors in achieving global development and global health. In Nightingale's footsteps, Nurse Coach leaders and all nurses are 21st century Nightingales who are coaching, informing, and educating for healthy people to be living on a healthy planet.

A century of the Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health.

With this issue, the Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health celebrates 100 years of continuous publication since its foundation as the Journal of Industrial Hygiene in 1919. During its first century, the Archives established an extraordinary legacy in the development of no less than three fields of research and practice: (1) occupational medicine, (2) industrial hygiene, and (3) air pollution studies and regulation. Its contribution to American environmental protection standards in air quality was particularly important, as the journal served as a major outlet for crucial air pollution research during the early years of the new United States Environmental Protection Agency. Its pages also chart the development of occupational health as an independent field, as well as the later emergence of modern environmental health as a related co-discipline. As the Archives moves into its second century of continuous publication, the journal will continue shaping the fields of environmental and occupational health; building on the solid foundation of evidence-based research from which humankind continues to benefit.

Environmental health in the biology century: Transitions from population to personalized prevention.

IMPACT STATEMENT: There is a rapidly occurring, dynamic change, in the causes of morbidity and mortality in different populations across the globe. More people today are being diagnosed and treated for chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes than ever before. Environmental exposures across the lifespan have a profound impact on the outcomes of these chronic diseases. Further, there are more people living today who have survived their therapy from these diagnoses and who are now differentially susceptible to environmental exposures. Collectively, this poses both the challenge and opportunity to the experimental biology and medicine community to build new models that reflect this changing human situation. The extraordinary advances in our understanding of the biology of disease provide extraordinary insights for both therapeutic and prevention strategies. Multidisciplinary teams including biological, physical, engineering and social and behavioral scientists will be needed to address this problem over the next several decades.

History, evolution and future of environmental health in Uganda.

This article explores the history and evolution of Environmental Health in Uganda under four key themes: training and practice; research; governance, policy and regulatory framework; and challenges. The article also describes the future of the profession. Through a review of documents and key informant interviews, it is noted that Environmental Health in Uganda dates back to colonial times when the country was affected by diseases including plague, trypanosomiasis and small pox. Concerted efforts were advanced to train cadres that would improve the sanitation status and address the prevailing disease burden. Over several decades, the Environmental Health profession has evolved in many areas of training, practice, research and governance, policy and legal framework amidst several challenges. The future of Environmental Health in Uganda will require more advanced training and research, broadened practice, and streamlined governance.

The contribution of the Clinica del Lavoro of Milan to the development of industrial hygiene and toxicology in the twentieth century.

In 1910, the founder of the Clinica del Lavoro of Milan, Luigi Devoto established a chemistry laboratory in the new institute, sustaining its importance in the study of occupational diseases. In 1948, the new director of the Clinica, Enrico C. Vigliani established the first laboratory of industrial hygiene in Italy, in the years of the economic boom. In 1960s, this laboratory, directed by Nicola Zurlo, significantly contributed to the research in the field. In 1980s and 1990s, the laboratory of the Clinica started to explore the field of environmental toxicology, studying the effects of benzene and other traffic pollutants on the general population. The analysis of history of the Clinica del Lavoro of Milan may represent a valuable tool for studying the origin and the development of industrial hygiene, occupational and environmental toxicology in the twentieth century.

Monsanto, PCBs, and the creation of a "world-wide ecological problem".

For the past three decades, we have written on the history of occupational and environmental health, authoring books and articles on lead poisoning, silicosis, asbestosis, and angiosarcoma of the liver, among other diseases. One book, Deceit and Denial, focused specifically on the chemical and lead industries. Because of the rarity of historians who study this history, we have been asked to testify on behalf of workers who allege harm from these industrial materials and by state, county, and local governments who seek redress for environmental damages and funds to prevent future harm to children. In about 2010, we began testifying in law suits brought by individuals who claimed that they had suffered from cancers, specifically non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their bodies. At that time, we wrote a Report to the Court about industry knowledge of the dangers of PCBs to workers and the environment. More recently, we have been approached by attorneys representing government agencies on the West Coast of the United States which are seeking funds to abate PCB pollution in their ports, bays, and waterways. The focus of these lawsuits is the Monsanto Corporation, the sole producer of PCBs in the United States from the 1930s through 1977. Through these law suits, an enormous trove of previously private Monsanto reports, papers, memos, letters, and studies have been made available to us and this paper is the result of our examination of these hundreds of thousands of pages. The documents from this collection (with the exception of privileged materials that Monsanto has not made public, and upon which we have not relied) are available on www.ToxicDocs.org , the website we have developed with Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. (Almost all of the references that are from this collection can be accessed by readers by clicking on the reference hyperlink.) This monograph is adapted from a report to the court that was originally produced for litigation on behalf of plaintiffs in PCB lawsuits. We are grateful to the Journal of Public Health Policy for publishing this detailed examination of these documents and we hope it will stimulate further research into this important, and now public, archive of industry records.

To Place or Not to Place: Toward an Environmental History of Modern Medicine.

Reviewing recent, overlapping work by historians of medicine and health and of environmental history, this article proposes a further agenda upon which scholars in both fields may converge. Both environmental and medical historians can seek to understand the past two centuries of medical history in terms of a seesaw dialogue over the ways and means by which physicians and other health professionals did, and did not, consider the influence of place-airs and waters included-on disease. Modernizing and professionalizing as well as new styles of science nourished attendant aspirations for a clinical place neutrality, for a medicine in which patients' own places didn't matter to what doctors thought or did. The rise of place neutrality from the late nineteenth century onward also had close and enabling historical ties to the near-simultaneous formation of place-defined specialties-tropical medicine, bacteriological public health, and industrial medicine and hygiene.

History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection.

The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981-1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001-2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermining science-based policy. The current administration combines both these strategies and operates in a political context more favorable to its designs on the EPA. The Republican Party has shifted right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in pushing deregulation. Among the public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted. For these reasons, the effects of today's ongoing regulatory delays, rollbacks, and staff cuts may well surpass those of the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose impacts on environmental health were considerable.

["The eco-nurse is an expert in environmental health"]. / « L'éco-infirmier est un expert de la santé environnementale ¼.

Eco-nurses are trained in environmental health in order to act as a resource person with the public and health professionals. Experts in the field, their scope of action is broad, both targeted and on a more global scale. Philippe Perrin is an eco-nurse and the director of the Environmental Health Training Institute in France.

[Tobacco cultivationin Salento (Apulia Region, Southern Italy) from 1929 to 1993: possible health implications]. / La tabacchicoltura nel Salento dal 1929 al 1993: possibili implicazioni sanitarie.

The Province of Lecce (Apulia Region, Southern Italy) is one of the Italian areas where the prevalence of respiratory disease and cancer of the respitartory tract is very high. Through a descriptive analysis of the historical series of tobacco culture indicators, a historical reconstruction of the development of tobacco cultivation in Salento (the area where the Province of Lecce is located) is here presented, in order to provide an additional element of knowledge on potential risk factors for respiratory diseases and cancers. Data regarding extensions in hectares and crop productions in the province of Lecce, in Apulia, and in Italy are from the Chamber of commerce of Lecce province and from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). From 1929 to 1993, the province of Lecce provided between 75% and 94% of the tobacco cultivated in Apulia Region and 25% of the national tobacco until 1945. Since the late Sixties, a growing increase in annual average production was observed, reaching 21.5 quintals per hectare in 1991 in Salento. This large tobacco production, associated with intensive use of pesticides, could be an element to be observed in analytical studies as a determining potential for the high prevalence of respiratory diseases and pulmonary cancers in the male population of the province of Lecce.