Change of Venue: Taking Environmental Mutagen Research to the Developing World

Abstract

The health of a nation could be said to depend upon the public health expertise of its scientists. In the United States and other developed areas of the world, it can be fairly simple to gain access to a variety of useful public health resources. But populations living in less-developed areas of the world often lack such knowledge and public health access. In 1987, two young scientists, William Au of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and Wagida Anwar of Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, decided to seek ways to raise the level of access to information and technical expertise regarding environmental health disparities in less-developed regions. With a main goal of encouraging collaborations for growth of scientific knowledge and expertise as well as clinical applications in underserved areas, they focused on organizing an international conference highlighting the latest research and information on environmental mutagens. The fruit of that labor, the International Conference on Environmental Mutagens in Human Populations (ICEMHP) series, has become a boon to the scientific community in developing nations. The next conference, sponsored in part by the NIEHS, is scheduled for May 2007 in Antalya, Turkey. NIEHS scientist Mike Waters, chairman of the ICEMHP International Advisory Board, says the institute has been a key participant in the conference series since its inception, noting that institute scientists have helped with organizing activities, and that NIEHS leaders have contributed personal and financial support. He also points out that the proceedings of the first two conferences were published in the October 1993 and May 1996 issues of EHP Supplements. According to Waters, the mission of the NIEHS lends itself to sponsorship of the ICEMHP series. “[The NIEHS] fosters national as well as international efforts to reduce the burden of environmentally associated disease,” he explains. “This series of conferences certainly has the same objective. It represents an effective means of communicating and extending the NIEHS mission and its research findings to the developing world.” Other past and current sponsors for the conference series include the U.S. CDC, Novartis Pharmaceutical Company, the U.S. Environmental Mutagen Society, the European Environmental Mutagen Society, the International Association of Environmental Mutagen Societies, the Turkish Society of Toxicology, Research Corporation, and the UTMB Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health and Sealy Center for Environmental Health and Medicine.