 Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be today here talking about these field of science environmental health But before we start I have a very important question for you super important Please raise your hand if you like dogs more than cats Okay, good. Please raise your hand if you like cats more than dogs Okay, we have a problem. No No, we don't have a problem. It's totally fine. We're not gonna judge you for thinking that But we can clearly see that there's a disagreement in this room, right now allow me to change a little bit the question Please raise your hand if you think being healthy is more important than becoming rich and having lots of money Okay, please raise your hand if you think becoming rich and having lots of money is more important than being healthy Okay, I see some it's fine. We don't judge you either But as you can see here, there's less of a disagreement, right? Most of us agree that health is such an important factor for us and this is exactly why I'm talking about health today I know this is a a topic that a lot of people are interested in and Health is a concept that brings us together in a world that gives us millions of reasons to disagree on right as we saw with The questions that you have asked Now health when people think about health They usually think okay. I get sick. I go to the doctor. They give me medicine and I am cured And yes part of health is like that, but there's also a preventive side of health And that's why I'm here to talk to you about environmental health Which is a branch of public health and in order to explain this concept to you which is gonna be pretty interesting I hope I'm gonna give you a very basic description or definition So environmental health studies how the environment influences human health seems pretty straightforward, right? It doesn't seem like a sophisticated or very difficult definition to understand But what do we mean by environment? Most of you are thinking about the natural environment, which is soil, air, water, chemical, physical, biological Factors within the natural environment, but we also mean the social environment For example our socioeconomic status lifestyle consumption patterns for Etc. And we also mean man-made environment or the built environment This is everything that surrounds us that was created by men For example this room the car that you took to come here the train The projector everything that is surrounding us That's the man-made environment and this is when this concept becomes a little bit tricky because well not a little bit pretty tricky You have to integrate these three dimensions of the environment in order to see what is affecting human health It seems like a very broad topic and it's because it is this is a field of science that is very multidisciplinary and in order to To learn it and to study it. You need sometimes multidisciplinary groups in order to to give you an example and for you to understand it better and the complexity of this of this Concept I'm gonna give you an example from my own country. I'm from Mexico in case you couldn't tell from my accent There's fellow Mexicans here. I've met them already And first of all I want to talk to you about my country. So this is Mexico This is a country that is in constant development Megadiverse country pretty high GDP according to the International Monetary Fund very cultural place beautiful landscapes everybody wants to be there right now a lot of fauna and Very good food. So yes, I'm showing off my country a little bit but I'm also the first one to admit we have issues right and One of the issues is that almost 50% of the population lives in poverty conditions Now this is a very strong factor within the social environment dimension I'm gonna talk about a specific vulnerable group in Mexico, which is Well, you're gonna see it's even worse when it comes to poverty here in green You can see the moderate poverty in in red extreme poverty at the end of the day both of them are poverty conditions so indigenous population Reaches over 70% of the people in in poverty conditions and indigenous people in case you don't know are native Original people from these from these places And these are two friends that I made while I was working there. So as you can imagine Working with these communities is a little bit difficult and they have some environmental risks that come Environmental health risks that come from the social factor of poverty So I worked here Well, I work with the Center of Applied Research in Environment and Health This is a center that is affiliated with the World Health Organization We work. This is my country and here highlighted. It has the the shape of a schnauzer dog That's my that's my state San Luis Potosí San Luis Potosí 11% of its population is indigenous communities and they are all in the tail of the schnauzer It's Huasteca so So as you can see it's very beautiful Lots of fun a very green you go there and somewhere in between these trees You're gonna find these indigenous populations. They use local resources They on a daily basis. This is the infrastructure of their houses and Generally of everything With palm tree palm roofs and these are two friends that I made there Adriana and Dulce Now they are living here and remember we arrived there and we wanted to do environmental health studies, right? So we knew about the poverty factor. We knew about the social factor We wanted to check. How is this affecting their health? We found a lot of things way more than the than here, but I'm gonna give you some examples These are the roofs that you can find in most of the houses They look pretty black and it's because they cook with wood. So it's full of smoke inside of the house There's no ventilation so it gets generated here which has aromatic polycyclic hydrocarbons That are related to cancer to some respiratory diseases Etc. When they don't have these roofs the wealthiest of all They change them to metal roofs now. This seems a bit better, but the problem with metal roofs is that right now? They are around 40 degrees Celsius So imagine the heat stroke risk here This is another health risk that's come that's coming from this man-made environment, which is the roof You can also find these types of containers in the backyards with water The problem here is that this is the perfect environment for mosquitoes to reproduce in these tropical zones And these mosquitoes sometimes carry diseases such as dengue That can be lethal for kids and that also don't have a cure most of them It's sometimes in the back years you can find electronic waste. This is just there and Of course is releasing heavy metals that also people are exposed to and can create cancer or are related to cancer There's a poor waste management system So they just there's no truck that comes and pick up their trash They just burn everything in front of their houses. Who knows what's being burned there who knows what fumes are We know there's dioxins which are pretty expensive to to measure for example But this is another health risk that they have Malnutrition due to the poverty and due to the lack of availability of food The kids have a lack of nutrition or they the things that they have is like coke or Lace, I don't know how you call them in English tabritas. I call them in Spanish Chips yeah, sorry and also import them to get clean water They they have to take them from water wells and they are as the water well That is depleted then they have to go farther and farther to get clean water several kilometers. This is a physical risk that Results in more injuries for example Now I'm gonna show you very fast an example of a project that we did here This is a group that is very multidisciplinary very big, but this is just one example keep that in mind So malnutrition we work with mothers of children between five and twelve years old in this community To co is a community. So we did a diagnosis. We arrived. What's happening here? What are they lacking? Are they really having issues with nutrition? Then we intervene and then there's an evaluation and this is a project that is still going on right now With the diagnosis we did several things. These are some of them I'm gonna focus on these food consumption frequency Questionnaire with this questionnaire where we could check. What are the nutritious the nutrients that they are lacking? So we saw okay. There's an issue. There's some nutrients that are lacking. What are we gonna do? We're gonna intervene or we're gonna go there and teach them how to make better diets, right? We cannot do that without knowing what can they buy, you know, there's a poverty factor So we're not gonna tell them buy this super expensive thing in the supermarket when there's no supermarkets So as you can imagine this was very complex and very difficult to do We did the intervention which was workshops with the mothers which are the ones that are in charge of cooking at home We could generate a new diets based locally on this specific look community With new recipes and we did emphasis with micronutrients for these we work with Nutritionists and and several other doctors chemists, etc. Oh Oh, sorry For the evaluation after one year we did more questionnaires We compare the growth of the children and I'm gonna as you can imagine We got a lot of data out of this project, which is just part of the project But I'm gonna show you just an example these were the main nutritional nutritional deficiencies that we found there And in red is the ones that after one year of the intervention. We saw that they were consuming more again Now this is not done Of course, this is these are projects that take years and years and years to do However, this is how you can do research in these very complex areas, for example And as you can see here, okay, it sounds very interesting sounds complex sound exciting But it's in Mexico. I've never been in Mexico. Some of you might say I don't know how they live And I've never been in an indigenous community. So how can I relate to environmental health? And is it an issue for me? Well in Germany, there's a lot of work going on with environmental health However, the government has done a very good job with regulations and voluntary agreements So you don't have to worry about it as much as indigenous communities, for example Or have it all the way within the back of your mind They have the environmental action program from for 2020 with an amazing goal living well within the limits of our planet And they have nine priority of priority objectives number three being environment and health They include indoor and outdoor air pollution, which is a very important topic in general They include Clean water and they include a topic that I think concerns to all of us, which is adaptation to climate change also affecting human health Now i'm going to give you an example of something you might be more familiar with mold So mold is a fungus that can grow in the walls and in the roof of our houses, right? These fungus can cause spores and when you are In contact with these spores you can get asthma or dermal and mucosal irritations We know this because of environmental health studies now um The in germany there has been an increasing number of mold and especially in winter We don't want to open our windows because it's too cold outside and then the humidity inside of the room Gets crazy and there's the perfect environment for the mold to grow So what we do especially what I do is I have this device that measures the humidity in the room And whenever I see it's going crazy Open everything grab my blanket and like freeze for a few minutes until until the humidity gets better and there's no mold in my house um So we know this and this is an example that you can see here Another example is from my own campus. I study in technician university pricing and university admission, but in pricing And they send me these they send me this email Uh, which is but you don't have to read it all. I can't explain you very very fast So they found this month in the oak trees near the campus and they send us this email guys We found this month alarm in red attention um, the caterpillars of this of this month Have hairs that can fly for a hundred meters, let's say and if you are in contact with them Then your skin gets itchy you can get allergy shock for example And they're telling us basically please avoid the oak trees in the campus. Don't walk there Um, if you have a car don't park it underneath an oak tree if you have a dog don't leave it near the oak tree so this is uh natural environment factor that is affecting our health and we know this also because of these studies now My message to you as you can see is that environmental health is an everyday life topic I'm sure a lot of you are already opening your windows because you don't want mold in your houses And you're not thinking oh environmental health um But so these are these are things that we do every day But there's a field of science behind all of that and there's a reason why we do it and there's a reason why we know that it works um effective solutions for these type of issues require knowledge and require you to be able to integrate these three dimensions of the environment So always think I cannot I couldn't go to the indigenous community and tell them Okay, buy this expensive cheese or whatever it might be or buy my meat because you need a certain thing If I know that they cannot afford it you need to think about the social environment too and about the mind and the environment too um An environmental health as you can see is a very multidisciplinary topic with these issues at least in Mexico. We have Sociologists toxicology psychologists Doctors everything working with us in order for us to make this type of studies and to to study this Um, so please don't be scared to get involved even if you are from a different profession You can always support something, you know They I'm sure they might be now apps coming out about Climate change and apps about air pollution and things like that So it people can also join. I don't know. We don't we're not judging um So if you If you want to volunteer in munich at least I know from green city green city is an Organization that works with a lot of things within the natural environment But as you saw everything is connected and everything at the end has an effect on human health in general So don't I leave you the website in case you want to volunteer and get involved with these topics And if you have any questions, I'm here. Thank you so much for listening to this talk Thank you very much joss, let's see what kind of questions we have. Yes, please I have a question Yes So the question is about interventions who are making decisions if the intervention should be taken and what kind of interventions and This kind of information. Yes. So what we do would for example in this type of small communities and we come with a university from this the state And we go there and we first do a diagnosis and the interventions are always focused on the people when it comes to indigenous communities You have to be very careful not to Go against their culture. So things like that So we do the diagnosis We see what are the environmental risks that we can find as I showed you before And then from there we do just like with a group We just take a group to to to try to intervene and see if there's a change And once there's a change and we can prove that there was an issue there and that this got solved Then with this scientific data, we can actually go and this can work as a Like as a proof for the government to to intervene in a higher scale with the whole community, for example Is that kind of what you meant or for the or for the For the research purposes at the beginning I would like to That the could you give some examples what what kind of images Okay, so apart from the malnutrition one There's one that we did when we changed all the stoves from the From several people in in this Community voluntary work if you wanted a ecological stove you you get one provided by the government on some research budget and then with these stoves we measured if they were actually The exposure to these aromatic polycyclic hydrocarbons was getting lower or not and according to that then They were they realized that there was actually a change and then the government put more More ecological Stoves for the rest of the people There was another one when we realized the water wells were very far away the clean water So they put some storage rain rain water storages for the people to not have to move so far away For the malnutrition one there was another one that was They thought the mothers also how to grow their own vegetables at home because sometimes there was a lack of availability of them So and this area is very fertile. So we went there and then we we taught them how to do it We also so okay. What can be grown here? We have biologists too and people like this And then um after that we also check again if this made a change And then it can probably become bigger But we we need first several years of proof that there is a difference when we when we intervene Okay, thank you. Josh. Yes. There is question here Is there an order of priority of taking care first of environment or people or hand or man made And So the question is if there is some order of priority What should be taken care of first environment or the health of people or man made environment? So what's the priority? Yes Well in these complex scenarios is very difficult to tell when you work with urbanized areas It's very different than when you work with on urban not urbanized areas Um, but what we do is that's why we do the diagnosis at first and we see okay What is the most urgent problem that they have because sometimes they want For example the metal roofs, but just because they look nice or you know something like this So we try to see okay. What is the most urgent thing? That they need and then from that we also see okay They they are dealing with malnutrition for example So maybe it's very expensive or they don't you know, it's very expensive in their local thing So we think okay, but that's not the only factor that is affecting malnutrition Malnutrition is also it's not only just giving them the food but teaching them Okay, what are the diets that you can do with this and how are these diets going to make a difference in the kit for example So Most of the times it's very complex and there are big groups because several things are working together It's not only one factor that we can focus on But when it comes to the issues We try to as a team and as a multidisciplinary team or say what is the most urgent one And what is the one that can cause an impact on on several one of them because sometimes everything is interrelated Thank you. I think there was a question on the back somewhere. Was it there one? No, okay Yes, so, I mean from what I heard from your talk, it seems to be mostly, you know a government driven activity I would just like to know to curiosity Which are I mean rich governments are spending the most of the budget on these kind of activities? Which countries are they like they lead by If you Yes, so I I don't have a specific data But what what we can know is that for example Costa Rica has made a lot of efforts To to help with environmental health and sometimes what we do Well, the research programs are not specifically driven by governments, but the intervention post Research sometimes can be driven by them But what we have seen is that Costa Rica have done a lot of things like that and Health has made a big impact there because that's when the the government spends a bit more money if you tell them, okay, there's a Monkey that is dying blah blah blah, you know some some governments are not very open to to work with environmental stuff only When you see okay, the the bees are dying here But this is affecting the people that is living out of providing honey And then these people then is having more issues and this is costing you more then that's when the government will Provide more budget. We know that Costa Rica is one of the very strong ones Thank you very much. Joss, I suggest that the further questions can be asked later after we are over with the event And you have still some time to interact with our speakers. Thank you very much