Environmental Change and Public Health

Brief Description: The course will deal with all aspects of the natural and built environment that may affect human health. Environmental health and environmental protection are very much related. Environmental health is focused on the natural and built environments for the benefit of human health, whereas environmental protection is concerned with protecting the natural environment for the benefit of human health and the ecosystem. Therefore, the course will deal with the strong foundation of fundamental pathologies related to environmental science that are required for a correct policy to work at the forefront of the field. This innovative degree program bridges the knowledge of the pathologies, with environment, technology, society and development using quantitative analysis and computational tools. Strengthening these connections meets a pressing need to train professionals who can creatively integrate different kinds of knowledge among different social groups in diverse settings. The program gives students a powerful understanding of where the sciences overlap and inform policy and society.


The main purposes of this course are:

1. To provide notions of the pathologies linked to the effect of changes of the environment, technology and society
2. To provide predictive instruments using computational tools to quantify the impact of environment, technology and society on changes in physiological processes related to pathologies
3. To provide the new instruments to integrate different knowledge to understand the impact of environmental changes on public health and the communicative strategies to inform policy and society.

In details, the following topics will be covered:
· Basic information on the main important pathologies due to environmental, technology and society changes. Following some example. Pollutants and emerging pollutants present in the water (i.e. heavy metal), junk food; scaffolds for human purposes. Presence of magnetic fields, use of computer or exposure to TV screen for long-time. Impact of sedentary jobs, obesity and role of physical activity.
· Simulation in a computer lab to study possible scenario of the impact of specific pollutants at the level of public health and investigation of possible solution exploring how different factors alone or together (i.e. temperature, policy etc) impact on the diffusion of the pollutants.
· Communicative strategies to inform policy and society in the presence of public health problem. How disseminate specialist information to non-specialized public and how to help policy to take the right decision.