Healthy Environments for Healthy People. The Environmental Health Program (EHP) provides rigorous analysis and visionary strategic leadership to stimulate policy and programmatic changes that can improve the health of people and the planet.
About the Program
EHP develops and promotes cutting edge, sustainable solutions to public health problems. We focus on asthma, cancer and other chronic diseases, rates of which are increasing faster than can be explained by genetics alone. Our purpose is to promote policy decisions in government and private industry that improve environmental and social conditions to enhance public health and human vitality.
Over six years, EHP’s research expertise and strategic leadership and vision have influenced the design of programs, policies and budget decisions. By bringing new information about links between environment and health and practical disease prevention solutions to new constituencies, we have found broader support for the use of safer materials, products, technologies and practices.
Rates of chronic disease continue to rise, depriving people from leading active, vibrant lives, compromising their productivity at work and in school, and burdening families and employers with billions of dollars of health care costs. Though genetics play a role, environmental and social conditions are key contributors, particularly for low income and people of color who suffer rates of disease and complications far greater than their white, middle and upper-class neighbors. As a result, interventions to improve those conditions have the potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer, diabetes, asthma and other debilitating illnesses.
Moving from the knowledge that environmental and social interventions can improve health and reduce health care costs, to policy changes and implementation of programs on a large scale, takes rigorous analysis and visionary, strategic leadership. The Environmental Health Program (EHP) was established to provide both of these, in partnership with our collaborating organizations and our colleagues within the Lowell Center.
Since 2004, EHP has led and contributed to initiatives that:
- document the state of the science linking cancer and asthma to environmental and occupational exposures;
- stimulate greater investment in prevention-oriented research, programs and policies focused on environmental risk factors that are associated with chronic disease;
- find long-term solutions to the exposure of urban children to environmental triggers that exacerbate their asthma;
- engage decision-makers in setting goals for working together towards a healthy future.
These initiatives have led to changes in policy, to innovative on-the-ground programs, and to new collaborations among people and organizations that have the potential to break through many of the barriers to prevention-oriented decision-making.
Current EHP projects include:
- Beyond Treatment: Embedding Environmental Interventions in Asthma Care
- Chronic Disease Prevention through Safer Materials, Products, Technologies and Practices
- Environmental and Occupational Causes of Cancer: From Knowledge to Action
- Toward Tomorrow: Vision and Tools for Healthy Futures
