This week’s output inlcude:
- A white paper draft that 1) introduces environmental health background 2) defines environmental health and its research community; 3) presents convincing cases that demonstrates how environmental data can inform human health research.
- Contacted members in DataONE, asking for a list of people that could be our potential interview participants.
The white paper draft now contains three main parts, key points are listed below:
1. Environment and human health
Environment and human health are intertwined. Adverse environment conditions are accountable for a large fraction of global death and disability. Recent global climate change has brought grave threats on human health. The negative effects- illness, injury, and disease – are mediated through complex mechanism that may be direct (heatwaves, extreme weather events, and air quality), indirect (changes in food yields, aeroallergens productions, bacterial growth, vectors activity, and water quality affected by disrupted ecological and biophysical systems),or delayed.
2. Environmental health as an emerging community
Under such context, a group of scientists who work on the intersection of environmental science and health science has emerged and formed a loosely coupled community known as “environmental health”. The topics of Environmental health research varies in scales ranging from environmental-attributable altering on genetics of pathogens to global scale disease patterns under climate change. And the nature of environmental health issues are so complicated that demands solutions that no single domain can address. Therefore, a group of scientists from various domains such as ecology, biology, chemistry, public health, social science and earth science, etc. are coming together to work towards a common goal of investigating and disseminating knowledge about environment influences on human health in order to promote well-being and prevent diseases and injury. We define such group of scientists as environmental health research community.
3. Environmental data brings new insights into human health research
Environmental community is not only characterized by multi-disciplinary collaboration, but also by integrated and data-driven investigation approach. The increasing availability of environmental data – satellite observational data, in-situ measurements, model outputs, reanalysis data, biotic surveys, and social science data – has generated numerous new scientific discover in human health research by stimulating spatial thinking and providing resources to uncover biological and ecological interaction between human and environment.
For next week:
- Develop next section of white paper: come up with a list of case studies, digging out what environmental data they used, where they found the data, are the data still available, what are the formats and types of the data, whether the author made their data available online.
- Get a list of people that may be interested in participating in our study. Follow-up with Amber and Alison.
- Develop a plan for our next step based on IRB materials.
Any comments and suggestions are welcome! 🙂