Environmental Health Disparities & Environmental Justice Meeting

Posted by on July 08, 2013

Environmental Health Disparities & Environmental Justice Meeting
July 29-31, 2013

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC

Meeting Description
On July 29-31, 2013 the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in partnership with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) , National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) , Office of Minority Health (OMH) , Indian Health Service (IHS) will host a meeting focused on identifying priorities for action to address environmental health disparities (EHD) and environmental justice (EJ). This meeting will bring together researchers, community residents, healthcare professionals, and federal partners committed to addressing EHD and EJ, in particular the grantees funded by NIEHS, EPA, NIMHD, CDC, OMH, and IHS. For the purposes of this meeting, EHD is defined as the unique contribution of the environment to health disparities.

The main goals of this meeting will be to:

• Acknowledge and build off past meetings that have identified historical EHD & EJ issues
• Prioritize research areas to ensure the most vulnerable populations’ issues are addressed
• Identify emerging EHD or EJ issues (new exposures that have not been considered in the past that may lead to new or additional health disparities) and,
• Develop a set of priorities that enables participants to set multi-year plans to address the most critical EHD and EJ issues

The meeting will include presentations, small group discussions, demonstrations, and poster sessions that lead to the development of an action agenda. Presenters will highlight challenges, emerging opportunities, and strategies to build upon existing efforts that bring community groups together with researchers. Specifically, the meeting will highlight and promote best practices of current and past EHD and EJ projects, and identify emerging issues and new directions in research, communication, capacity building, training, and evaluation. An additional goal of the meeting will be to foster new partnerships at the local, state, regional, tribal, and national levels. The meeting is also intended to bring together new partners to the discussion of environmental health disparities. Such partners could include: anthropologists, sociologists, and economists as well as those with expertise in law, policy, analysis and evaluation.

http://tools.niehs.nih.gov/conference/ehd_ej_2013/index.cfm.