MEDICAL GEOLOGY OUTREACH: A MAJOR SUCCESS STORY FROM TURKEY

It is incumbent upon medical geology practitioners to reach out to students, science faculties, decision makers, and the biomedical/public health communities to promote this emerging discipline. Perhaps the most successful of these efforts has taken place in Turkey where medical geology courses have been opened in four medical and engineering faculties in Turkey: Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Cumhuriyet University, Harran University and Selçuk University. Three graduate and nine undergraduate medical geology courses are being offered in the Geological Engineering Department of Akdeniz University, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Dokuz Eylul University, İstanbul Technical University, İstanbul University, Middle East Technical University, Niğde University, Osmangazi University and Selçuk University. Also, one undergraduate medical geology course is being offered in the Environmental Engineering Department of Harran University. Moreover, Hacettepe University recently opened a Mesothelioma and Medical Geology Research and Application Center. The Turkish Chamber of Geological Engineers has a special chapter on medical geology. Interactions of medical geologists with other scientific disciplines have been common for a decade. For example: geological engineers have been organizing various scientific activities such as panel, workshops, and symposium on medical geology. The first and second medical geology symposium was held in 2005 and 2015, respectively. In addition, the first medical geology workshop was held in 2009 in the Cappadocia Region and the second in 2013 in Antalya. The Geological Congress of Turkey, a long established, highly respected scientific event for earth sciences in Turkey, will hold their 71^st conference in Ankara in April 2018. The main theme of the conference is “Geology and Health”. In conjunction with this event special sessions and panels will be organized related to various fields of medical geology in this important conference. As a result of these outreach efforts by the Turkish medical geology community there has had a robust interaction and with scientists from many disciplines and collaborative research on groundwater quality, asbestos, radon, arsenic, mesothelioma, fluorosis etc. Clearly, these outreach efforts have demonstrated that medical geology studies are important to Turkey and also demonstrate the value of outreach.