Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Criminology, The University of Auckland, 58 Symonds Street, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
Int J Soc Determinants Health Health Serv. 2024 Jan;54(1):28-39. doi: 10.1177/27551938231169119. Epub 2023 Apr 26.
Since the 1970s, environmental health researchers have documented environmental pollution's impacts on human health, which includes the bioaccumulation of industrial chemicals and how these toxicants contribute to disease. However, the relationship between disease and pollution is often difficult to discern in the disease information provided by dominant institutions. Previous scholarship has identified that print media, television news, online medical publishers, and medical associations consistently obscure the environmental causation frame. However, less has been said about disease information provided by public health agencies. To address this gap, I analyzed the leukemia information provided by Cancer Australia, the United States' National Institutes of Health, and the United Kingdom's National Health Service. My analysis shows that the disease information offered by these health agencies also obscures the environmental causation frame by failing to identify most toxicants that environmental health researchers have linked to leukemia and by emphasizing a biomedical framing of the medical condition. Beyond documenting the problem, this article also discusses the social consequences and sources of the problem.
自 20 世纪 70 年代以来，环境健康研究人员已经记录了环境污染对人类健康的影响，其中包括工业化学物质的生物积累以及这些有毒物质如何导致疾病。然而，在主导机构提供的疾病信息中，疾病与污染之间的关系往往难以辨别。之前的研究已经确定，印刷媒体、电视新闻、在线医学出版商和医学协会一直在掩盖环境致病框架。然而，关于公共卫生机构提供的疾病信息却很少有人提及。为了解决这一差距，我分析了澳大利亚癌症协会、美国国立卫生研究院和英国国民保健署提供的白血病信息。我的分析表明，这些卫生机构提供的疾病信息也掩盖了环境致病框架，未能确定环境健康研究人员已经将大多数与白血病有关的有毒物质，并强调了对医疗状况的生物医学框架。本文除了记录这一问题外，还讨论了该问题的社会后果及其根源。
