Individuals and communities today face many health problems that can be associated with our environment, including waste, unhealthy buildings, suburban sprawl, air pollution, water pollution, and environmentally related stress. In 1998, the Institute of Medicine created the Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine as a venue for interested parties from the academic, industrial, consumer, and federal research perspectives to meet and discuss sensitive and difficult issues of mutual interest in a neutral setting. The purpose is to foster discussion among people in different sectors and institutions that will illuminate issues, not resolve them.
At our first workshop, Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment: A New Vision for the 21st Century, the participants and Roundtable members explored the need for a broader perspective of environmental health--one that incorporates the natural, the built, and the social environments. This workshop discussed many of the challenges that members of the environmental health community are facing and strength the need for engaging nontraditional partnerships in addressing these issues.
As a follow-up to this workshop, the Roundtable has begun to sponsor regional workshops to understand the complex issues in various regions in the United States. Iowa, with its expanse of rural land area, growing agribusiness, aging population, and increasing immigrant population, provides an opportunity to explore environmental health in a region of the country that is not as densely populated. Agribusiness will continue to shape this landscape as the country progresses from family operations to large-scale corporate farms. The shifting agricultural practices will have impacts on environmental health. Other topics of potential interest are urban sprawl into rural regions, the changing built environment, and the intersection of the social environment and health.
This workshop was an opportunity for interested parties to discuss these local concerns in the broader scope of environmental health, and to stimulate dialog about these issues among local business leaders, architects, urban planners, engineers, public health scientists, environmental scientists, health care providers, social scientists, clergy, educators, and the general public.