Module 1: How to Understand Environmental Injustice
Featuring:
Dr Julia Pescarini
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Dr Julia Pescarini at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to speak with us about the role of epidemiology in understanding and addressing health injustice.
Through epidemiology’s focus on policy and populations, we can form other approaches to structural air pollution advocacy.
Key Learnings: Definitions
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An event, activity, or occurrence that is a trigger for a physiological stress response, for instance losing your job or experiencing food insecurity.
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A medical science that studies the distribution, causes, and control of disease in a population. Epidemiology is a cornerstone of public health, informing policy decisions and healthcare practices.
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Health is the ability for our biological systems to enter stability after experiencing trauma or stress throughout our entire lifetime, to give us all an equal opportunity to realise our full potential.
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Quantifiable characteristics of a population which researchers use as supporting evidence for describing the health of a population.
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A set of ideas or principles that guide how a government acts on specific issues.
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An event, activity, or occurrence that is a trigger for a physiological stress response, for instance losing your job or experiencing food insecurity.
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According to the World Health Organisation (WHO): The social determinants of health (SDH) are the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems.
Key Learnings: Our Thoughts
Epidemiological perspective is centered on population and related to environmental factors, such as housing.
Social policies can be tools for advocating health justice on a structural and population level.
Characteristics (floods, heat, poverty, racialisation) don't sum, they catalyse each other.
We should be co-designing policies with communities as epidemiology and academia is becoming more open to these processes of lived experience data.
Some links, especially involving contamination and health, are hard to measure and draw long-term conclusions or evidence policies.
There is an opportunity for communities to create health indicators that are not commonly presented in national health datasets.
What in this lesson stood out for you?
Debate Questions
These questions are framed to help you apply your own experience and perspectives to points raised in this lesson.
How convinced are you about epidemiology as a pathway to justice at the population level through its application in policy?
What sort of institutions do you believe would be trustworthy in creating, storing, and applying data about populations for justice?
Are you aware of policies that exist for key determinants of health in your area? If so, how adequate are they? If not, what is one you wish would be there?
How To…
Identify health injustice from an epidemiological lens
Political Layer(s):
Which institutions, if any, have identified the phenomena?
Scientific Evidence/Data Layer(s):
Is data and information on the phenomena congruent with lived experience? Are there any sources of data that would recognise lived experience of the injustice?
Social Layer(s):
Which demographics are disproportionately affected? Which demographics are disproportionately associated with the injustice?
Biological Health Layer(s):
What are current health conditions associated with the injustice? What conditions should be associated with the injustice?
Next Lesson:
Module 1 Lesson 4