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| The members of the Johns Hopkins Center in Urban Environmental Health recognize that despite steadily improving health status for the nation, residents of our cities still have a disproportionate burden of acute and chronic disease. The contribution of environmental exposures to this disease burden is a critical factor that needs to be understood to improve public health. Today, a majority of people in this country live in cities and by 2050 over 75% of the world's population will be urban dwellers. The inner-city poses particularly unique problems with the imposition of multiple environmental stress factors on special populations that may have limited access to health care. Thus, the public health challenge facing us is how can we improve the health of individuals who now and in the future will live in urban environments. Thus, the mission and goal of this Center is to identify environmental exposures and susceptibility factors that alone or together increase risk of illness for people living in urban environments, such as Baltimore City, then to use these findings to develop prevention strategies to improve public health. Historically, public health based preventive interventions have resulted in vast improvements in the health of populations when single major risk factors occurred in the environment. In the modern urban environment people are exposed to a diverse array of chemical and biological agents, each one contributing directly and/or indirectly to adverse health effects. Further, each of these exposures can interact with underlying individual genetic and environmental susceptibility factors that contribute to poorer health outcomes. Hence, the problems that we confront today in understanding the role of the urban environment in chronic human health outcomes are much more complex than in the past and addressing these problems requires a coalescence of multiple professional talents and scientific disciplines. The conceptual framework of our Center program is that risk of the individual or population for disease is the result of interactions between environmental exposures and susceptibility factors. An understanding of these interactions can lead to the rational design of preventive interventions. The disease burden in a community will be the result of the interaction between exposure, susceptibility and the availability and efficacy of prevention measures. To succeed in accomplishing the goals of this Center, we have brought together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers whose specialties include, epidemiology, toxicology, physiology, molecular biology, behavioral sciences, biostatistics and environmental engineering. In total, our Center promotes basic, applied and clinical research in environmental health and proactively works to translate scientific findings to the design of prevention measures. Thus, the public health goal of the Johns Hopkins Center in Urban Environmental Health is to contribute to the reduction of morbidity and mortality induced by environmental agents in people. Next
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