Oral

When APHA’s Environment Section was founded 100 years ago, the public health professionals who addressed threats from harmful exposures in the environment concerned themselves with microbial threats such as cholera, typhoid and TB as much as they did with lead, mercury and other chemical threats. They recognized that studying diseases of workers would provide critical insights into the potential harm chemicals and pathogens could cause to the general public through environmental exposure routes. It is only over the past 50 years or so that environmental health scientists defined themselves as studying chemical exposures to the exclusion of environmental pathogens, and regulatory and scientific developments in occupational and environmental health have separated data collection and risk management efforts in those two fields. While there are some benefits to increasingly specialized research, monitoring and regulatory approaches, such separation also leads to a growing failure to recognize interactions and syngergies, and opportunities for more effective public health protection are lost. In this session, several of the nation’s leading experts in environmental and occupational health will discuss the need to re-unify the historical threads of environmental health and their approaches for doing so.

Session Objectives: 1. Identify key interactions between environmental exposures and microbial pathogens 2. Describe key benefits from greater integration of occupational and environmental health 3. Describe initial opportunities for integrating occupational health and environmental monitoring and surveillance

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)