The following information appears in a box on page 22 of the final report.
The Important and Synergistic Roles of Regulatory and Public Health Agencies in Identifying and Reducing Environmental Health Risks
The effort to sustain our gains in public health and environmental health protection will be most effective if regulatory and public health agencies work together. Regulatory and public health agencies have important and complementary roles to play in setting policies for environmental health protection and risk management. Yet, in general, these two communities do not interact sufficiently and the connections between environmental exposures and public health are not well established.
The likely synergy between environmental and public health agencies is a reservoir of untapped potential for environmental risk management. Many environmental pollution problems can be identified by their public health contexts. For example, construction of an asphalt batch plant was proposed in Boston. The residents of the urban community in which it was to be constructed were found by public health officials to have a relatively high incidence of asthma and cardiovascular disease. The public health findings signaled a potential environmental health problem that could have been exacerbated by emissions from the asphalt plant. On that basis, construction of the plant was opposed by citizens and by the public health agency, and a decision was made to try to locate the plant elsewhere.
Environmental, public health, and social agencies can work together with community activists to define problems and to develop and implement strategies to manage environmental risks in the full context of poverty, poor schools, and inadequate housing. As our society works to reduce risks in an era of diminishing resources, it is vital that environmental and public health agencies collaborate in deploying the tools of public health—epidemiology, exposure assessment, surveillance, nutrition, genetics, and behavior change—to identify and evaluate the most cost-effective ways to reduce risks and improve public health in all segments of the population. The public health community should accept the challenge to play an influential role in setting national, state, and local priorities and in developing strategies to understand, manage, and prevent environmental risk.