SYNOPSYS

From air pollution to climate change, local and global environmental health risks now threatens the health, well-being and survival of an increasing number of populations worldwide. According to the WHO, 23% of all global deaths can be linked to the environment. This accounts for some 12.6 million deaths annually, of which 7.3 million deaths occur in the South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions, while 60% of global deaths are due to outdoor and indoor air pollution. In order to minimize such health risks and impacts, qualitative and quantitative environmental health risk assessment (HRA) and health impact assessment (HIA) tools can be applied to systematically assess both acute and chronic health risks. For chronic health risks both non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic health risks can be assessed and modelled. Currently in Malaysia, HRA and HIA are adequately applied in assessing the health impacts of development projects in environmental impact assessment (EIA). There is a need to extend its applications in the assessment of health-related development policies like energy, industrial and agricultural policies. Recent environmental issues like bauxite mining, rare earth processing, industrial toxic chemical releases, and arsenic river contamination also call for proper HRA and HIA to be conducted.

SPEAKER BIODATA

Jamal Hisham Hashim is a visiting professor of environmental health at Universiti   Selangor. He is also a director of Provenue Corporation Sdn Bhd which specializes in health risk and impact assessment. He was formerly a research fellow at UNU-IIGH and Malaysia’s first appointed professor of environmental health at the National University of Malaysia (UKM). Prof. Jamal obtained his PhD in environmental health from the University of Michigan. He has taught, conducted research and consultancy in environmental and occupational health at UKM and UNU for the past 36 years, and has supervised a total of 14 PhD students. His research interests are mainly on the health effects of heavy metals, pesticides, solvents, air pollution, risk assessment, and recently, climate change. He has been the principal and co-investigator of 19 research projects, and has over 380 publications and presentations to date, including 92 full articles in refereed and indexed journals. He has been engaged as an environmental health consultant in over 80 local and overseas projects, primarily in the area of environmental health impact and risk assessment. He has also been consulted by the World Health Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency, Risk Science Institute and the Institute of Medicine in the U.S., the governments of Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia on various environmental health issues. He is a registered environmental impact assessment consultant with the Department of Environment, Malaysia, a member of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health in the U.K., an honorary fellow of the Academy of Occupational and Environmental Medicine Malaysia and a council member of the Asia Chapter of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. He also sat on the Scientific Expert Panel of the National Disaster Management Agency (NADMA), and chairs the Thematic Working Group of Environmental Health Experts under the National Environmental Health Action Plan (NEHAP). He is also the Founding Chairman of the Progressive Malay Movement or PROMOVE.