Health Consequences of Environmental Exposures: Causal Thinking in Global Environmental Epidemiology

Causal inference in environmental epidemiology

Inferring causality is necessary to achieve the goal of epidemiology, which is to elucidate the cause of disease. Causal inference is conducted in three steps: evaluation of validity of the study, inference of general causality, and inference of individual causality. To evaluate validity of the study, we propose a checklist that focuses on biases and generalizability. For general causal inferen...

Environmental and Occupational Exposures in Immigrant Health

Immigrants comprise vulnerable populations that are frequently exposed to a multitude of environmental and occupational hazards. The historical context behind state and federal legislation has helped to foster an environment that is particularly hostile toward caring for immigrant health. Current hazards include toxic exposures, air and noise pollution, motor vehicle accidents, crowded living a...

Environmental epidemiology: An introduction

Public health implications of environmental exposures.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a public health agency with responsibility for assessing the public health implications associated with uncontrolled releases of hazardous substances into the environment. The biological effects of low-level exposures are a primary concern in these assessments. One of the tools used by the agency for this purpose is the risk assess...

Global environmental health: sustainability.

edi tor 's note : NEHA strives to provide up-to-date and relevant in­ formation on environmental health and to build partnerships in the profes­ sion. In pursuit of these goals, we feature a column from the Environmental Health Services Branch (EHSB) of the Centers for Disease Control and Pre­ vention (CDC) in every issue of the Journal. In this column, EHSB and guest authors from across CDC wi...