ECOLOGICAL PUBLIC HEALTH, EPIGENETICS AND EXPOSOME THEORY

Our campaign is informed by Ecological Public Health,  epigenetics and exposome research strands that examine the intergenerational impacts on humans and non-humans alike, of lifetime environmental exposures. The exposome model has been described as an ‘integrated science of nurture’ that helps to ‘fulfil the promises of the Human Genome Project’. According to recent research (also reported on in a Guardian article),  ‘the concept of the exposome, which encompasses all lifetime environmental exposures, underscores the importance of studying pesticides as mixtures rather than in isolation’.

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FURTHER READING

• Betts, K. 2012. Characterizing Exposomes: Tools for Measuring Personal Environmental Exposures. Environmental Health Perspectives120(4): A158–163. 

• Buck Louis, G.M. & Sundaram, R. 2012. Exposome: Time for Transformative Research. Statistics in Medicine 31(22): 2569–2575.

• DellaValle, C. 2016. The Pollution in People: Cancer-causing Chemicals in Americans’ Bodies. Environmental Working Group Original Research. 

• Dupré, J. 2016. A Postgenomic Perspective on Sex and Gender. In: Smith, D.L. (ed.). How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, pp. 227–246. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Lioy, P. 2015.  Exposure Science and its Places in Environmental Health Sciences and Risk Assessment: Why is its Application Still an Ongoing Struggle in 2014? J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol25(1–3).

• Lioy, P. & Rappaport, S. 2011. Exposure Science and the Exposome: An Opportunity for Coherence in the Environmental Health Sciences. Environmental Health Perspectives 119 (11): A466–467.

• Miller, G.W. & Jones, D.P. 2014. The Nature of Nurture: Refining the Definition of the Exposome. Toxicological Sciences: An Official Journal of the Society of Toxicology137(1): 1-2.

• Morris, G. & Saunders, P. 2017. The Environment in Health and Well-being. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. 

• Nash, L. 2006. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge. Berkeley (CA): California University Press.

• Parry, S. & Dupré, J. 2010. Nature after the Genome. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

• Racca, M.E., J. Cepeda, M.A. Cardozo et al., 2025. "Pesticide Exposure as Prenatal Exposome: a biomonitoring study in pregnant women from Argentina”. Chemosphere 285. 144528, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2025.144528.

• Rayner, G. 2020. Covid-19: One Part of An Ecological Public Health Crisis. Discovery Society, 19 April 2020. 

• Rayner, G. & Lang, T. 2012. Ecological Public Health: Reshaping the Conditions for Good Health. Oxford: Routledge. 

• United Nations. 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015. See in particular, seventieth session, Agenda items 15 and 116. 

• Watts, N., Adger, N.W., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., et al., 2017. The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate change. The Lancet 389 (10074): 1151–1164. 

• Whitmee, S., Haines, A., Beyrer, C., et al. 2015. Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch Report of the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health. The Lancet386: 1973–2028. 

• Wild, C.P. 2005. Complementing the Genome with an ‘Exposome’: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention14: 1847-1850.