Name: Youssef Oulhote, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Title: “Developmental Toxicants: From Research to action while waiting for regulations”.

Summary: Working on environmental determinants of health is challenging. Beyond the technical methodological complexities, most of the environmental exposures are embedded in socio-economic determinants that are very difficult to intervene on, because we don’t know of specific well-defined feasible interventions. On the other hand, intervening on environmental chemicals through regulations is a lengthy process, highly dependent on the political and social landscape. However, while waiting for regulations, we can imagine complementary interventions that may blunt the detrimental effects of developmental toxicants, and settings where awareness of environmental health issues may stimulate new population-based policies. This talk will first introduce current work on environmental neurotoxicants, with a focus on recent results from birth cohorts. Second, I will present recent work on the interplay of nutritional factors and environmental toxicants in the development and etiology of disease, and I will also present some potential extensions of this work to low- and middle-income countries where environmental health issues are still considered relatively inconsequential.