Evidence-based Advocacy to Protect Children’s Environmental Health: A Discussion of the Latest Science with Dr. Ruth Etzel
March 12, 2014 @ 10:00am (AKDT)
Over the past four decades, the prevalence of autism, asthma, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and birth defects have grown substantially among children around the world. Not coincidentally, more than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed and released into the global environment during this same period. Today the World Health Organization attributes 36% of all childhood deaths to environmental causes. Because children are exquisitely sensitive to their environment, exposure during their developmental “windows of susceptibility” can trigger cellular changes that lead to disease and disability across the life span. Join Dr. Ruth A. Etzel, co-editor of the Textbook of Children’s Environmental Health for an update on the mounting scientific evidence linking pediatric disease with environmental exposures.
Featured speakers
Ruth A. Etzel, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Epidemiology at the Zilber School of Public Health at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She is no stranger to Alaska. She first came to Bethel in 1979 for a short-term stint as a medical student and later would return from the lower 48 to Bethel just for the month of January to cover Dr Ron Brennan’s pediatric practice while he prepared to run the Iditarod. She adopted one of Dee Dee Jonrowe’s sled dogs and raised it in Atlanta, Georgia. She moved to Anchorage in 2001 to take a position as Medical Director of Research at Southcentral Foundation, where she stayed until 2008.
When she left Alaska, she moved to Switzerland, where she was Senior Officer for Environmental Health Research at the World Health Organization from 2009 to 2012.
Dr Etzel received the national Children’s Environmental Health Champion Award from the U.S. EPA in 2007 for outstanding leadership in protecting children from environmental health risks.
The new book that she co-edited with Dr. Phil Landrigan is the Textbook of Children’s Environmental Health.