A Canadian research team led by an SFU professor has launched the world’s first interactive website, which aims to help Canadians understand how critical environmental influences are on their health.
The Canadian Environmental Health Atlas’ main purpose is “to illustrate the myriad of ways the environment affects our health” via not only its physical characteristics — air pollution, industrial plants, or tobacco smoke — but also its social, cultural, and economic ones. Atlas does so by exposing the user to case studies that incorporate maps, graphics, videos, and infographics.
The lead scientist for the project, SFU Health Sciences Professor Bruce Lanphear, explains how a major problem in today’s understanding of diseases is that everything is treatment oriented — current studies seek to cure disease and reduce symptoms, rather than focusing on prevention. Lanphear believes the focus needs to shift to altering the environmental influences that the public is exposed to, as these are what trigger disease (in combination with genes).
“To help people understand if we want to prevent the chronic diseases that plague us, we have to understand and address the environmental influences that we’re surrounded by,” said Lanphear. “It’s not enough to create drugs or new medical technologies. We’ve got to understand how to deal with environmental hazards that we’re all exposed to on a regular basis.”
It’s not enough to create drugs or new medical technologies.” – Bruce Lanphear, SFU Health Sciences Professor
The idea for a health atlas originated in 2008, when Lanphear and several other experts were asked to serve on a panel that discussed linking health and the environment for Health Canada and Statistics Canada. What came out of the conversation was the idea to create a database that was accessible to students and the educated public, so that experts and researchers could try to impact public discourse.
Lanphear feels that this site is distinguished from similar databases in three ways: it invites experts to share their research through case studies; it incorporates interactive graphics; and it operates with objective data.
Despite having launched the site, Lanphear feels the team still has a long way to go. “We’ve really just scratched the surface,” explained Lanphear. “If we’re going to do this right, we’ve easily got another five years.”
“We’ve put up 12 different topics and we hope to put up one or two topics for the next eight months,” said Lanphear. “Beyond that we’re going to continue to find funding, and we’d really like to expand it from a Canadian environmental health atlas to a world atlas, because so many of the studies and so much of the information is deeply relevant to other parts of the world.”
