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OCR for page 10
Keynote:
Ensuring Environmental Health in
Pennsylvanian
Kathleen McGinty
Most of this country's environmental progress over the years has been engi-
neering-intensive, as in attending to many of our infrastructural needs that have
environmental components water supply, for example. We have focused far
less on the environment's human-health linkages.
This is especially true for global environmental issues. It's hard enough to
communicate local and immediate environmental concerns to the public, even
when there is at least some degree of tangibility to people in the smoke plume
or the dirty water, for instance that they may experience directly. But the com-
munication problem is magnified in dealing with such abstract things as global
warming and climate change, where the health connections are not always so
obvious.
Here, we especially rely on experts to come forward and provide leadership,
not only in explaining things but to persist—push forward on alerting the rest of
us to health-environment linkages when they meet with the inevitable indiffer-
ence or outright resistance. Eventually, they help us see the light.
Often the missing link in environmental discussions is health. When health
effects are brought to the forefront, the magnitude of the problem or the solution
often becomes clear. For example, Sherry Rowland (a chemist at the University
of California, Irvine) discovered the phenomenon of stratospheric ozone deple-
tion; he was the first scientist to advance what some wanted to call a wild theory
that chlorofluorocarbons might be causing it! But the importance of this work
was not recognized until the health connections were made clear he explained
that people will suffer cancers because of the stratospheric ozone loss. That
missing link was the health link, and this case certainly underscores just how
important the work of people engaged in environmental health really is.
*This chapter is an edited transcript of Secretary Kathleen McGinty's remarks at the workshop.
10
OCR for page 11
KEYNOTE: ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN PENNSYLVANIA
1
7
The health community brings another dimension to the discussion as well. It
is a calming dimension, in that it speaks to where the highest risks are and where
the highest risks aren't, or how risk should be handled and understood. For
example, the work that the health community has done in helping to answer the
question of "How clean is clean?" has made a big difference in determining
where our environmental cleanup dollars should go. The health community's
willingness to step up to the plate and help federal, state, and local governments
address that question to establish priorities is always very much appreciated,
especially in tight budgetary times.
Such involvement has had the effect, for example, of enabling massive
efforts such as Pennsylvania's brownfield cleanups or what we like to call our
"industrial-sites recycling effort." Toxic contamination has been cleaned up in
this state at more than 1,000 sites, where economic vitality has once again been
made possible.
This happened because at the same time that the health community was
noting where there was a human health threat, it was also willing to distinguish
between what was justified and appropriate and what was less so. This ability to
calm concerns and fears by putting things into proper perspective is a very
important asset.
Yet we must also acknowledge the vast arena in which we have very little
information and where there is so much to do to fill in the details. For instance,
we may know something about the impacts of some individual chemicals, but
we don't know enough about the potentially synergistic interactions between
them. Not only is our scientific understanding very rudimentary in that regard,
but our regulatory programs have not been designed in ways to even consider
those synergistic effects. Even though we do talk about watersheds and airsheds,
for example, permitting decisions are usually made on the basis of individual
requirements for particular pollutants, one at a time.
Another gap to fill: Theo Colborn points out in her book Our Stolen Future
(which addresses issues related to endocrine disrupters and hormone-mimicking
chemicals) that sometimes it isn't the volume of a chemical that might pose the
most dangerous threat to a human being but the stage of that person's develop-
ment when the exposure occurs. So for a small body that's rapidly developing, a
small insult may make a vast amount of difference, much more so than if the
insult were larger but happened at a later stage. There, again, health research is
so important to our understanding of these complex matters, but it also is impor-
tant because it shines a spotlight on some of the inadequacies of our regulatory
structures.
Meanwhile, things are happening on the detection front. By tracking and
monitoring acute and chronic illnesses, we are beginning to make linkages to
environmental conditions that may be related to those illnesses. And here I must
commend Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for
what it has been doing in this regard.
OCR for page 12
2
ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
We started work several years ago, stimulated by the West Nile virus issue,
to develop an innovative information-technology-based tool a shared inter-
active database that for the first time brought data together from DEP, the state's
agriculture department, and its health department. By including compatible sets
of data in one open-architecture system and portal, analysts could see in a very
precise way and in real time where incidences of West Nile were occurring,
factors (such as weather, or the location of specific animal populations) that
were contributing, and what actions would be most appropriate for example,
responders could make decisions on where to spray and where not to spray in a
much more intelligent fashion.
Building on that West Nile database, the state created PAIRS the Pennsyl-
vania Incident Response System which was developed in the aftermath of
September 11, when it was realized that a much more effective real-time system
was needed to gather data and understand situations that might be evolving. It
too is a computerized tool that brings together a variety of Commonwealth
agencies that can help us to understand, track, and stay on top of emergency
incidents, as well as respond to them.
What we would now like to do is to build on that architecture even further
to make it a robust system that tracks linkages between environmental and health
occurrences
Representative terms from entire chapter:
west nile
