This course covers chemicals in our environment and in our bodies and how they impact our health. It addresses policies and practices related to chemicals, particularly related to how they get into our bodies (exposures), what they do when they get there (toxicology), how we measure them (biomonitoring) and their impact on our health. Most examples are drawn from the US.
Lecture 0: Chemicals and Health: Course Overview - Megan Latshaw
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Из курса от партнера Johns Hopkins University
Chemicals and Health
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Week 1: Welcome & Introduction
Start off this week with the peer assessment (we know, we know. . .how can we have an assessment before the course even starts, right?). We simply hope to gauge your initial understanding of the topics that we’ll cover (so grade easy).
Then we get into a quick overview of the course, a discussion of chemicals & how we are exposed (in three parts) and an introduction to chemical production & regulation. The module ends with a fun homework assignment: watch an eight-minute video and discuss amongst yourselves (and with us too).
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Dr. Megan Weil Latshaw, PhDCo-Director of the Masters Programs in Environmental Health
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Beth A. Resnick, MPHAssociate Scientist
Health Policy and Management
[MUSIC]
Hello everyone, and welcome to our course, Chemicals and Health.
Chemicals make up every part of us.
Some chemicals are vital to our health, while others maybe harmful.
In this course, we will focus on the effects of some of the many
chemicals that we encounter everyday.
My name is Megan Latshaw, and my colleague, Beth Resnik and
I created this course.
I'd like to begin by telling you a bit about ourselves and
I'd like to start with Beth.
She is an associate scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health in the department of Health Policy and Management.
Beth serves as the Director of the Office of Public Health Practice and
Training and the MSPH Program in Health Policy.
Her research and practice interests include, assessing and
improving the public health infrastructure,
enhancing knowledge of potential environmental and
health connections, and developing effective public health policies.
On a personal notes, Beth has three sons, and she and
her husband live out side Washington DC.
Moving on to me,
as my nine year old daughter will tell you, I'm not a real doctor.
I have my PhD in Environmental and
Occupational Health from Johns Hopkins, where I'm now on faculty.
Before that I served for almost ten years as the Director of
Environmental Health Program at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
And my job there was to strengthen environmental and
public health laboratories.
I focused on creating a national bio-monitoring system and
ensuring that our state and local labs were prepared for
emergencies related to chemical or radiological terrorism.
Now I oversee the Masters of Health Science and
the Masters of Science Degrees in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.
And I also work on the Bloomberg American Health Initiative.
I co-lead the Environmental Challenges piece of that initiative.
I live in Baltimore with my husband and my feisty nine-year-old.
So Beth and I have brought together this amazing group of scientists and
public health practitioners from across the United States.
These are the leaders in their field, and the experts.
You'll hear more about them in a bit, but irst,
I'd like to tell you why we chose to do this course.
Well, for starters,
have you ever thought about what life was like before the chemical age?
Glass bottles meant more visits to the doctor or hospital for
stitches or infections.
You can see a picture of old fashioned milk bottles in the top left.
Speaking of infections, unchlorinated water meant illness and
death from cholera and typhoid fever.
In the middle, you can see an old poster about cholera.
And on the right, you can see beds lined up down a long building,
full of patients sick with typhoid fever.
Fewer pharmaceuticals also led to higher rates of morbidity and mortality.
And cleaning involved a lot more tired arms.
As you can see this woman on the left using a ringer to clean out her laundry.
And finally, think about children's metal toys.
When they broke, you couldn't just glue or
tape them back together like this old-fashioned car toy on the bottom right.
Despite better living through better chemistry,
many people fear exposure to chemicals.
We know some chemicals at certain levels are not good for us.
For example, most everyone knows not to drink cleaning supplies,
or inhale gasoline fumes at the station.
We're also starting to learn that some chemicals,
even at very low levels, may impact our health.
For example, endocrine disruptors may cause imbalances in our delicate
hormone systems having effects that maybe passed down from generation to generation.
Also, the more we study lead,
the more effects we find at lower and lower levels of exposure.
It's often the unknown that scares people the most.
The questions that science has yet to answer, or
the sheer overwhelming feeling some people gap when they think
about all the chemicals that we come into contact with everyday.
This slide shows just a quick search on chemicals and health and
all of the results that come up in national and international news.
This course hopes to help everyday people better understand.
Chemicals, how they are made and how they get into the environment.
Exposure, how chemicals get from the environment into our bodies and
how we measure them.
Toxicology, what chemicals do in our bodies and
what our bodies do to them.
Public health impacts,
how chemicals impact the health of the entire population.
And policy implications: what laws,
regulations, and policies govern chemicals.
This course is taught at the college level,
it assumes basic knowledge of biology and chemistry.
It has a total of 15 lectures that are about 20 minutes each across six modules.
We engage you with videos, a discussion board,
two quizzes, and two writing assignments.
Before we even begin,
we ask that you complete a short peer reviewed writing assignment,
describing your current understanding of chemicals, and how they impact our health.
This assignment only counts for 5% of your grade and
serves as an introduction to peer reviewed writing.
We also hope it will serve as an interesting comparison to the last writing
assignment, which will ask a similar question.
Getting to the actual course material.
The first modules provide an introduction to chemicals in our environment and
attempt to answer the question, what is a chemical and how are we exposed?
You're listening to the first speaker now.
My goal is to cover an introduction to the course and an overview of the syllabus.
One of my heroes, Professor Tom Burke will define the word chemical,
explain how populations are exposed to chemicals, and
describe how chemicals get into our bodies.
Then you'll hear from me again, and
I'm going to talk about things like chemophobia, which is fear of chemicals.
And what happens when we substitute one chemical for
another when we often don't know anything about the second chemical?
And lastly, some other myths about chemicals and health.
Then you have your first homework assignment.
We'll ask you to watch an eight minute video on chemicals and
personal care products.
Then we want you to think critically about the video which has many good
factual points but which also tries to tap into a fear of the unknown.
Finally, we hope that you will post your thoughts on the first model
including the video on the discussion board.
Module two introduces you to the field of toxicology and
tries to answer question, what do chemicals do in our bodies.
Professor Michael Trush will explain the concept of dose response.
He'll describe the continuum from environmental hazard to
exposure to internal dose to health effects.
He'll explain the concepts of absorption,
distribution, metabolism, and elimination.
He'll highlight the connection between toxicology and pharmacology.
Then you will have your first quiz, it will be multiple choice and
will focus on the first two modules and comprise 20% of your grade.
Module three focuses on biomonitoring,
which is the fancy way of describing the measurement of chemicals in our body.
We start off with a homework assignment that includes two videos.
A two minute one on public health laboratories and a five minute one on
a Kentucky community concerned about chemical exposures in their neighborhood.
Then we want you to post your thoughts on the discussion board.
Dr. Mortensen will do the first lecture providing a definition of biomonitoring
and how it differs from diagnostic testing that a physician may do.
Then she will describe how biomonitoring is used and
interpreted, including its limitations.
She'll explain the role of CDC in addressing chemical exposures and
she'll provide an overview of the national exposure report.
Dr. King will discuss how CDC's data can or
cannot be used at the state and local level.
She will also introduce public health laboratories and
the system within which they work.
She'll describe the role public health laboratories in biomonitoring and study
design,and she'll explain the difference between public and commercial labs.
The fourth module addresses the health effects of chemicals, Dr.
Cliff Mitchell will explain the difference between association and causation.
He'll discuss different types of health effects.
He'll describe various health endpoints, and
he'll introduce CDC's Environment Public Health Tracking Network.
Dr. Nachman will discuss hazard identification and
the broader risk assessment process.
Then there will another multiple choice quiz.
This one will focus on Modules 3 and
4, and also comprise 20% of your grade.
Module 5 covers chemicals policy, specifically asking the question,
what do we do as a society about chemicals and health?
Dr. Denison will describe some of the approaches to addressing chemicals
at the population level.
He'll also discuss the US's approach to chemical regulations and
compare it to Europe's.
Dr. Samet will talk about air pollution as it relates to chemicals' policy.
Specifically, he will touch upon historical air pollution,
how it relates to health, how the US EPA regulates air pollution,
and how air quality has improved.
You will have one final assignment.
A peer-reviewed writing assignment that will comprise 35% of your grade.
Our final module demonstrates how all these concepts come
together to help address real world problems and questions.
Dr Ken Aldis from the New York State Department of Health will talk about
non-smokers who are exposed to smoke just by being in the same room as a smoker,
and how New York measured their exposure both before and
after a ban on smoking in restaurants.
Dr Joanna Collin from Johns Hopkins will talk about tobacco companies'
newest products and how they try to stay viable given new restrictions on smoking.
Then Dr Avashi Rangen will discuss chemicals in food and
other consumer products.
Finally, Professor Patrick Brissey will address nanotechnology and worker health.
We have one last module that doesn't get its own slide since it will simply
be a way to pull everything together and provide some ideas for next steps.
There are some big questions we hope to cover and
we've tried to do it an a fun engaging way.
Your participation and feedback will be key to making this a useful course.
So we hope to hear from you along the way, enjoy.
[MUSIC]
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