Foreword: 10th Anniversary Review: Natural disasters and their long-term impacts on the health of communities

José A. Centeno

Dr José A. Centeno is a Senior Supervisory Research Scientist and Chief of the Division of Biophysical Toxicology at the Department of Environmental and Infectious Disease Sciences, US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington DC. Dr Centeno received his BS and MS in Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 1979 and 1981, respectively; and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Michigan State University in 1987. He is the Director of the International Tissue and Tumor Repository on Chronic Arseniasis, the Registry on Uranium and Depleted Uranium, and the International Registry on Medical Geology. Over the last decade, he has focused his attention on environmental toxicology, environmental pathology, medical geology, and health effects of trace elements, metals and metalloids, and has conducted research and teaching training activities on medical geology in over 30 countries.

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José Centeno introduces the 10th Anniversary Critical Review by Cook et al.

In recent decades, there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of the interaction of living organisms with their natural environment. The primary focus has been on understanding exposure to hazardous agents in the natural environment through air, water, and soil. Assessment of exposure to natural, environmental, geological hazards and processes, however, has been often the weakest link in most human health risk assessments, arguably because ‘medical geology’ has only recently become an established and legitimate field of study. Medical geology—the science concerned with the impacts of natural environmental geologic materials and geologic processes on animal and human health—is a dynamic emerging discipline bringing together the geoscience, biomedical, environmental and public health communities to solve a wide range of environmental health problems.

Medical geologists are interested in understanding the outbreaks of disease in which the characteristics of the local, regional, and/or global geologic constituents are causative or contributing factors to the occurrence of various disease states. For the most part, diseases of interest have mostly included the effects of deficiency or toxicity of a variety of trace and metallic elements on various systemic organs or the long-term effects of exposure to oncogenic elements, the most prominent example being arsenic. Globally, we are confronted with a formidable range of actual and potential natural physical processes and materials which may have deleterious effects on human and animal health, including exposure to natural dust and radioactivity, exposure to naturally occurring toxic organic and inorganic compounds in drinking water, as well as geologic processes, such as volcanism, erosion, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. The following review by Cook et al. in this issue of the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (JEM), provides a critical and systematic approach to examining illness patterns, long-term effects, and ongoing health surveillance in populations that may be exposed to some of these natural disaster events. As these authors stated, the short-term ill-health following these natural disasters may capture the eye, but the long-term health impacts and the recovery process are often overlooked and deserve more attention from scientists and public health authorities.

Understanding the potential environmental and health effects of many of these geogenic and anthropogenic processes is of critical importance in order to: (1) increase public and governmental perception and appreciation of the importance and relevance of earth sciences to environmental, human and animal health; (2) identify environmental causes of known health problems, and in collaboration with biomedical and public health researchers, seek solutions to prevent or minimize these problems; (3) to reassure the public when there are unwarranted environmental health concerns associated with natural (and in some cases, anthropogenic) materials and processes; (4) to forge links and collaborations between developed and developing countries to find solutions for environmental health problems.

Over the last 10 years JEM has proven itself as a medium for outstanding contributions to the advancement of environmental health sciences, public health, and medical geology. I would like to congratulate JEM for this remarkable success. On behalf of the International Medical Geology Association, we would like to express our gratitude to JEM for the opportunity to publish the latest developments of medical geology, and we would like to encourage all scientists interested in learning more about the interactions of the natural environment and public health to contact JEM and to actively contribute with their scientific results.

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