Environment and Public Health

This course is designed as a seminar to give students an introduction to the field of environmental public health. The course will explore current and fundamental literature of environmental health (EH) science. We will also discuss the disproportionate burden of EH problems on vulnerable communities in the U.S. and around the world. Major topics will include air and water pollution, global sanitation and waste, toxicology, pesticides, food security, and climate change. The course has a strong emphasis on environmental justice and on the global health impacts of our environmental footprints. Students will learn about the debates and issues foregrounding the need to view ecology and human society as a whole in order to understand and prepare for these changes. The course emphasizes evidence-based approaches for arriving at program strategies and policy recommendations to improve environment health response for the most vulnerable. A significant thrust of the course will be to enable students to think of policy and programmatic approaches to communities vulnerable to environmental and climate variability.