Children's Environmental Health

Children’s environmental health is an academic discipline that studies how environmental exposures in early life influence risk of disease, and adverse health outcomes both in childhood and across the entire life span. The environment that we grow up in plays a key role in determining our survival, health and wellbeing throughout our life. Early life, starting at conception, is a vulnerable period of life during which the environment can have both immediate and lifelong adverse and beneficial effects. Harmful environmental exposures such as toxicants in the air, water, food and consumer products as well as beneficial factors influence health in early life and shape our health and resilience to unhealthy environmental exposures later in life. The environment and climate change are inextricably interlinked. Global changes affect our environment, ecosystems, societies and way of living in many ways impacting human and plantary health and hereby posing the greatest treath to human health, especially children’s health. Recognizing that most common non-communicable diseases have a part of their origin in early life and that exposure to environmental factors early in life differ from exposure later in life, makes prevention in early life efficient both from a public health and economic perspective. This course offers opportunities to gain knowledge on how environmental factors shape human health in early life and onwards and a deeper understanding of how to study children’s environmental health. 

The course aims to provide a broad overview of classic and modern environmental hazards and methods used to evaluate their impact on children’s health. The course will introduce why environment in early life matter and how our exposure to environment during early years can have both immediate and lifelong effects on health, the state of the changing environment, key concepts and methods of relevance for children’s environmental health epidemiology and risk management. Environmental factors ranging from persistent organic pollutants to emerging exposures such as those related to climate change, endocrine disruptors and use of plastic, the toxicology will be introduced. The course will provide examples on how to identify hazards from environmental factors, application of epidemiology methods as well as how to integrate experimental and epidemiological evidence into risk assessment and management.