Scope of the Meeting

The title On Airs, Waters, Places comes from a text attributed to Hippocrates of Kos and dated to about 400 BCE. It is one of the earliest surviving attempts to connect the environment with human health.

The title was not chosen as a historical ornament. It framed a working question: what does the oldest environmental health writing still teach a field that now works with satellites, sensors, biomarkers and large cohorts? The meeting used the phrase to hold together the history of environmental epidemiology and its next generation of methods.

Air

Air pollution remains one of the most heavily studied environmental exposures, but the questions keep changing. The meeting covered ambient and household sources, exposure assessment, low level exposures, respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes, and the policy choices that follow from the evidence.

Water

Water connects climate, sanitation, food systems and chemical exposure. Sessions on drinking water, contaminants and climate pressures sat alongside work on the wider determinants of health in low and middle income settings.

Place

Place is where environmental exposures meet social life. Urban form, green space, noise, housing, mobility and inequality all shape who is exposed and who is protected. The programme treated these not as background variables but as part of the causal picture.

Environmental epidemiology has always been a field of measurement and interpretation. It asks what people are exposed to, how exposure changes over time, and what health differences follow. The tools have changed: from local observation to national cohorts, from single pollutants to mixtures, from fixed monitors to personal sensors and exposomic profiles.

The 2019 programme reflected that breadth. It included symposia on the air pollution metabolome, exposomic methods, the human microbiome, big data, quasi experimental designs and the global burden of disease. It also made room for policy, ethics and the influence of corporate actors on environmental health evidence.

The meeting did not try to settle the field. It tried to show where the most useful questions were forming and to put researchers from different regions and traditions in the same rooms.

• Bring together researchers, public health professionals, policy makers and students from around the world.
• Give the field a shared view of current evidence and emerging methods.
• Connect the history of environmental health to the questions that will shape its future.
• Support participation from developing countries, students and new researchers.
• Keep time for discussion, disagreement and the informal exchange that sustains a scientific community.