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Environmental Exposure & Health Initiative (EEHI)

Programme background

A joint initiative between the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Department of Health (DH), Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, launched under the umbrella of the Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership.

Increasing population growth and urbanisation is leading to augmented pressures on ecosystems services and human health, including adverse health effects of contaminated water, land, food or air. This is caused by a variety of pollutants such as endocrine disruptors, drugs, pesticides, or particulates, often combined with other environmental and dietary stressors such as increased temperature and a diet low in anti-oxidants. For example, air pollution is currently estimated to reduce the life expectancy of every person in the UK by an average of 7-8 months, with estimated equivalent health costs of up to £20 billion each year.

In order to develop better and more tailored evidence-based policies there is an urgent need for more accurate and sophisticated measurement and quantification of environmental exposures linked to human health outcomes. This will then provide the essential building blocks for the definition of health risks, the generation of predictive models for cost benefit analyses, and the evaluation of regulation.

While there have been significant recent advances in the determination of the genetic impact on common diseases, the interactions with environmental pollutants and stressors are poorly understood and rely critically on accurate exposure assessment. The exploitation of recent technological advances for instance in sensor and 'omics' technologies for personal monitoring and the development of biomarkers of exposure and early effects provide an unprecedented opportunity to address gene-environment interactions and health related-exposure response relationships as part of an integrated programme linking multiple environmental pollutants and stressors with human health effects. Connecting environmental measures to large data sets in cohorts and populations creates another opportunity.

This initiative aims to support collaborative, innovative and interdisciplinary research that addresses the relationship between environmental pollutants (in water, air, soil or food), other interacting stressors and human health, with the intention of advancing the development of evidence based policies and practices. The programme seeks to integrate sophistication in exposure measurement with research addressing evidence, mechanisms and scale of human health effects, and how these are influenced by environmental, behavioural and socioeconomic factors.

There are significant opportunities to build on UK strengths, including especially the potential to capitalise on and enhance the UK's unique and internationally leading cohort infrastructure through improved exposure measurements or linkage to comprehensive environmental monitoring information.