Relations between human health and the environment in the Anthropocene

We'll be looking at the persistence of this field, one of whose aims is for society to make the object of its research - "poisons" - disappear, and in particular at the concepts and approaches, both observational and experimental, on which it is based. We will reflect on the advances required to move from the causal model of infectious risk factors (seen as necessary causes of disease, often acting in the short term) to the identification of low-dose physico-chemical risk factors, according to a model in which causes are generally neither necessary nor sufficient, and can act in the long term on the risk of a multifactorial pathology. Today, environmental health research mobilizes all scales, from molecule to organism to population, and a disciplinary continuum including physical sciences, life sciences (including epidemiology and toxicology), data science and human and social sciences. In the case of certain environmental factors, this enables us to cover all the stages from the emission and dispersion of pollutants, the identification of health hazards, the assessment of the corresponding level of evidence, the characterization of population risk (the estimated number of cases attributable to a cause), right through to the political management of this risk.

Focusing on factors that have emerged or whose levels have risen sharply during the Anthropocene,the lecture will review families of compounds with proven effects on human health (lead, airborne particles), followed by factors for which knowledge is more recent, such as certain endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A. This course will look at the approaches used today to characterize the effects of contaminants in humans: cohorts, individual dosimeters and exposure biomarkers, enabling fine characterization of exposures and in-depth phenotyping that data derived solely from questionnaires in the era prior to that of this molecular epidemiology did not allow. We will then discuss higher-throughput approaches based on the notions of theexposome, which aims to constitute the genome's counterpart, and the global burden of disease attributable to the environment, which aims to establish a hierarchy of the health impact of environmental factors, an important promise for public decision-making.

We will conclude with a symposium providing insights into how environmental health and human sciences research can be mobilized to help tackle climate change, the major challenge of our century, and to reinvent a post-fossil fuel society, as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, that would best safeguard public health.