Environmental and occupational medicine and injury prevention: education and impact, classroom and community.

The core value guiding the work of physicians and health workers, including those in Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology and Medicine and Injury Prevention, is to protect the health of the public, especially its most vulnerable individuals. In these fields, we emphasize teaching the use of epidemiology, the core discipline of public health, as a tool for early detection and prevention of disease and injury, as well as an instrument for hypothesis testing. The classic core topics are toxic and physical exposures and their effects, and strategies for their prevention; emerging issues are child labor, mass violence, and democide. In environmental health, students need to be prepared for the reality that the most important and severe problems are often the most difficult to investigate, solve, and evaluate. The following are some recommendations for producing graduates who are effective in protecting communities from environmental hazards and risks: (1) Teach the precautionary principle and its application; (2) Evaluate programs for teaching environmental and occupational health, medicine and epidemiology in schools of public health by their impact on the WHO health indicators and their impact on measures of ecosystem sustainability; (3) Develop problem-oriented projects and give academic credit for projects with definable public health impact and redefine the role of the health officer as the chief resident for Schools of Public Health and Community Medicine; (4) Teach the abuses of child labor and working conditions of women in the workplace and how to prevent the hazards and risks from the more common types of child work; (5) Upgrade teaching of injury prevention and prevention of deaths from external causes; (6) Teach students to recognize the insensitivity of epidemiology as a tool for early detection of true risk; (7) Teach the importance of context in the use of tests of statistical significance; (8) Teach the epidemiologic importance of short latency periods from high exposures as sentinel events for later group risk for cancer and stating the case for action; (9) Protect students and colleagues who are whistleblowers in environmental health from harassment and punishment; (10) Develop curricula and workshops that promote the use of epidemiologic tools for preventing genocide, democide, and their precursors. Schools of Public Health and Community Medicine are at the interface between the resources of academic power and the major problems of community health. Implementing the above recommendations will strengthen academic investigation and impact.