Read the full article by Emily Henderson (News-Medical Life Sciences)
“Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what inspired your latest research?
I am an Assistant Professor in the Division of Environmental Pediatrics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Among other things, my research focuses on the health effects of environmental chemicals that we’re commonly exposed to in our everyday life.
While it’s all very well and good to advise people about lifestyle changes they can make to try to avoid toxic chemical exposure, sometimes those choices are expensive, for example, purchasing only organic food, and sometimes you simply don’t have a choice. For example, if your water system is contaminated.
A far more effective strategy from a public health point of view is to regulate the chemicals at their source, so they don’t make it into our food and water, our personal and household care products, and the built environment in the first place. But industries fight this kind of regulation, and governments worry about the costs politically as well as economically.
We thought it might help to persuade policymakers to take action if we presented them with the healthcare and loss of productivity costs of inaction, which it turns out are very high indeed – and we just focused on one class of chemicals!” …