Multiple Links Towards Integrating Teams for Understanding of Disease and Environment - Multitude

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The project will organise a Workshop to bring together expertise on Environment and Human Health from a wide range of different disciplines. In particular, it aims to establish interaction, and scope for new research collaboration, between currently isolated expertise in the health/medicine and the environmental/geochemical subject area. The Workshop will begin, after an opening plenary session to set the scene, with a fieldtrip to a local case study site (ICI / Weston quarry / village) with presentations by industry, health and the community. This will exemplify the current issues that are being tackled, the approaches and methods being applied, and the need for new interdisciplinary research to improve the way such situations are investigated, and the human health outcomes improved. Five workshop sessions will then concentrate discussion on key topics for research:- 1. Transport and dynamics of toxic pollutants in the natural environment and their effect on human health. 2. Uncertainty in risk assessment, epidemiology and regulation. 3. Social, economic and behavioural factors in the genesis and health impact of environmental hazards. 4. Strategies for improving health in contaminated situations. 5. The effects of multiple toxic pollutants on health. These sessions will be lead by two experts on each topic, one from the health/medicine viewpoint and the other from the environmental/geochemical. After brief introductory presentations to identify the key issues from both perspectives, the leaders will initiate a substantial discussion with the participants to synthesise the two approaches and identify new collaborative research that can better investigate the situation, and provide optimal ways to improve human health outcomes. The finding of each workshop session, over its three iterations, will be reported back to a combined final session to bring together and synthesise the conclusions of the workshop as a whole. The papers presented at the workshop, and summaries of the discussions from each workshop, will be written up for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Geochemistry and Health.