The Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine was established to provide a mechanism for parties interested in environmental health from the academic, industrial, and federal research perspectives to meet and discuss sensitive and difficult environmental health issues of mutual interest in a neutral setting. The purpose is to foster dialogue, but not to provide recommendations.

In its broadest sense, the environment is a major determinant of human health and well-being. Healthy environments promote individual and community health. Unhealthy environments can create substantial morbidity, mortality, and disability, and adversely impact the economic welfare of societies. A 1999 poll by the Pew Charitable Trust reported that eighty-six percent of the U.S. population believes that the environment has a direct impact on their health. There is a long history of basic research demonstrating the links between environmental health and human health. However, further advances in environmental health will require a commitment to cross-disciplinary research, development of new technologies, and understanding of behavioral, dietary, and genetic factors.

The importance of environmental health was the focus of the Institute of Medicine’s 1988 report, The Future of Public Health, which concluded that  “the removal of environmental health authority from public health agencies has led to fragmented responsibility, lack of coordination, and inadequate attention to the health dimensions of environmental health problems.”  The Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine used this conclusion to initiate a dialogue on the role of environmental health in public health and well-being. These early discussions and the Roundtable’s first workshop explored the need for a broader perspective of environmental health to include the natural, the built, and the social environments, and their impacts on human health.

Since its inception, the Roundtable has addressed current and emerging issues in environmental health through discussions related to the state of the science, research gaps, and policy implications. Areas of focus have included the role of the built environment in promoting health, gene-environment interactions in diseases such as cancer, and research needs for environmental monitoring and exposure science. The Roundtable has explored these issues at a local level through regional meetings to better understand the role of environmental health within U.S. communities.

The Roundtable has moved towards an increasingly global perspective in its discussions on nanotechnology, the interrelationship between trade and health, and corporate social responsibility in environmental health. The Roundtable is currently focused on issues of domestic and international importance, such as climate change, sustainable drinking water, transportation-related energy use, and environmental health decision making.