Research Ethics for Environmental Health explores the ethical basis of environmental health research and related aspects of risk assessment and control.
Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and that control is a matter of implementing standards that unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Coming from multiple disciplines and nine different countries, the contributors to this book critically examine a diverse range of ethical concerns in modern environmental health research.
This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental health, as well as researchers in applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, bioethics and those concerned with chemical and radiation protection.
Introduction, Gaston Meskens, Friedo Zölzer; Part 1: Environmental health ethics in general; 1. Environmental health in a global context, Susana Paixao; 2. Values and ethics as upstream determinants of population health: The Earth Charter at the local level, Colin L. Soskolne; 3. Cosmopolitanism and environmental health, Gaston Meskens; Part 2: Ethical challenges in toxicological research; 4. Toward a medico-legal convergence to ethically protect the public’s health, Carl F. Cranor; 5. Connecting the dots: toxicological decision-making and communication in the 21st century, Steven G. Gilbert; 6. Developing teaching material in ethics for chemistry and chemistry engineering students, Tom Børsen; Part 3: Ethical challenges in radiation research; 7. The ethics of the co-expertise process in the post-nuclear accident context, Jacques Lochard; 8. Citizen participation in post-accidental recovery: Radiation doses and welfare measurements, Liudmila Liutsko, Elisabeth Cardis and Deborah Oughton; 9. A new horizon in health research ethics: A view from the perspective of radiological protection, Chieko Kurihara; Part 4: Research ethics for environmental health; 10. Roles for ethical and social values in environmental health research, Kevin Elliott; 11. The flow of values in environmental risk assessments, Per Wikman-Svahn 12. Principles of research ethics for environmental health – historical development and current trends, Friedo Zölzer
Friedo Zölzer is professor of environmental sciences at the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at the University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. His main professional interests are radiological protection and environmental health, as well as related questions of ethics. Gaston Meskens is a scientist, philosopher and artist. He works part-time with the Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Ghent, Belgium, and with the Science and Technology Studies group of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK•CEN.
