Commissioner: Stephan Bose-O´Reilly, MD
“New times, new diseases. Global pollution causes severe health hazards for children.”
PD Dr. med. Stephan Bose-O´Reilly is a Paediatrician and Master of Public Health with a special degree in Environmental Medicine. At the University Hospital Munich he works for the Institute and Outpatient Clinic for Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine, leading the unit for Global Environmental Health (see full bio below).
Why did you decide to join the Global Commission on Pollution + Health?
Because I consider this topic as an emerging issue, and want to raise more awareness for the global problems of pollution for children’s health
What impact will the work of the Commission have?
The work of the Commission will most certainly have great influence – the report will be taken into account by policymakers all over the world, hopefully in a way that they increase their efforts to decrease the intolerable exposure of children with toxic substances.
How can we overcome obstacles to progress in the fight against pollution? What changes do you hope to see in your lifetime?
We have to stop the export of environmental problems from the developed world to low- and middle-income countries. If we use the products from low- and middle-income countries, we are responsible as well for the well-being of workers, their families and children. We can’t import only the goods, we need to care as well – for the waste and pollution. We need to change our lifestyles! We need a global awareness for this issue of global pollution. International, national, local efforts are needed to raise the awareness and to come to action, action from policymakers, governmental and non-governmental agencies, from scientists, engineers, health care experts, and many others are urgently needed.
PD Dr. med. Stephan Bose-O´Reilly is a Paediatrician and Master of Public Health with a special degree in Environmental Medicine. At the University Hospital Munich, he works for the Institute and Outpatient Clinic for Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine, leading the unit for Global Environmental Health. He is engaged in a World Bank project to rehabilitate a lead-contaminated area in Zambia, especially in empowering the health care sector to diagnose and treat chronic lead intoxicated children. Since 1998 he was involved in several field studies in gold mining areas in Ecuador, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
He is involved in two projects for climate change adaption within the health care sector. Health assessment and training, as well as networking including intergovernmental agencies are his main areas of interest. He is an Assistant Professor in Hall i.T in Austria at UMIT (University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology) where he is the head of the program on Prevention, Environmental Health at the Department of Public Health. He is a member of the chair board of the “International Network Children’s Health Environment and Safety” (INCHES).
Within the HEALS project he is leading the work package on training and he is involved in other tasks, such as dissemination, modelling and neuro developmental diseases. HEALS is an abbreviation for Health and Environment-wide Associations based on Large population Surveys. HEALS represents a comprehensive applied methodology focusing on the different aspects of individual assessment of exposure to conventional and emerging environmental stressors and on the prediction of the associated health outcomes. His main interest is to prevent children from disease by helping to optimize the policy – science interface; especially in his zone of knowledge – children’s environmental health.
The Commission on Pollution and Health is an initiative of The Lancet, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with coordination from the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank. Commissioners include many of the world’s leading researchers and practitioners in the fields of pollution management, environmental health and sustainable development.
