EXPLORING THE INTERSECTIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND URBAN MEDICAL GEOLOGY

As humanity increasingly concentrates in urban environments, it is critical to focus a lens on how urban environments impact the health of city dwellers. The geosciences have historically examined processes that occur in the “natural” environment, i.e., devoid of humans. But human modifications to environments yield unique and important problems that need a different approach by geoscientists as they explore the myriad links between natural materials and processes and human health, and emergence of terms like “geohealth” and “medical geology” are reflecting this new approach. A number of critical issues are profiled here, particularly as they apply to urban medical geology. Dust storms and natural as well as human-influenced aerosols and gases that are further influenced by climate change have profound global impacts on global health, some of which are still not well-known. Natural disasters have always played a role in the arc of human health, but many of them are exacerbated by human activities and can play an outsize role in death and disease in concentrated urban environments. Occupational protection of workers is also a key responsibility of regulators, but one which is often inadequate to provide adequate safety of workers from exposures to a myriad of organic and inorganic toxicants. Finally, we focus on lead, a powerful neurotoxin with permanent impacts on the future of children worldwide, and one which, even though we have now identified most of the exposure sources and pathways, we have devoted very little attention to in terms of mitigation. Lead is likely the easiest urban medical geology issues that we face from a scientific standpoint, but it has proven intractable from a practical standpoint and thus a host of citizen-science programs have emerged to help identify hotspots and promote action.