The College of Public Health (CPH) offers the course PUBHEHS 3310: Current Issues in Global Environmental Health to bring awareness to the severity and prevalence of health issues due to environmental factors. According to the World Health Organization, 24% of all estimated global deaths are associated with the environment, urging the need for environmental health studies.
Dr. Paul Rosile, Clinical Associate Professor of Practice at the CPH, is one of the instructors of this course, which qualifies as General Education under the Lived Environments theme. Dr. Rosile’s motivation for teaching this course is to bring the science of Environmental Health to a practical level so that students gain an understanding of how exposure to environmental factors occurs in their daily lives at work, home, play, or school.
In this course, students begin learning about the relationship between the environment and health and well-being, and how it varies locally, regionally, and internationally. Foundational topics of Environmental Health Science (EHS) are then introduced, including toxicology, epidemiology, how ecosystem health impacts human health, and environmental health justice and ethics. As opposed to other science-based courses, PUBHEHS 3310 focuses on the social determinants of health, such as where humans are born, raised, live, and work.
This course uses the One Health EHS Model to help students understand the sources and exposures of environmental health hazards, which are in the form of chemical, physical, and biological agents in the environment that affect human health, and how they travel to humans. The impacts of human exposure to these hazards are then studied on an individual, group, and societal level.
Working with this model helps students develop a foundation of exposure science and assessment, risk communication, and environmental health policy development. These concepts are important for students to understand how 1. risk estimates of exposures to environmental agents are made by scientists, 2. risk is communicated to the community, and 3. risk estimates are translated to environmental health standards that allow for safe exposures without appreciable impacts on health.
The course integrates discussions on sustainability and resiliency and these topics are relevant to energy use and climate change. Students will understand and be able to communicate how the burning of fossil fuels for energy is related to climate change and how the effects of climate change, e.g., global warming, impact human health at a large scale, and the actions that can be taken now and in the future to reduce these impacts.
To increase the learning of environmental health topics such as sustainability and resiliency Rosile created a project in the course’s curriculum for students to put their environmental health knowledge and video production skills to the test. Students are instructed to create a short, engaging video to represent one of the environmental topics/concepts in the course.
Check out this student group’s video on what small changes you can make to promote environmental health and sustainability in your community.
CPH offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses related to EHS. Take a look at the EHS Course Descriptions to view their full offerings.
Story by Christine Andreeva, Student Communications Assistant