Life and work, Part 2: The exposome at work

Part 2: How environmental, occupational and personal factors coalesce

Summary:

In the second of her two-part feature, exposure scientist Dr Miranda Loh explains how environmental, occupational and personal factors combine to influence individual risk. An ‘exposomic’ view of exposure, for example, helps explain individual risks of infection and health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic and can inform interventions to reduce those risks.

 In the first part of this two-part feature, we presented the ‘exposome’ as a concept for investigating the impact of the environment on health1. The exposome is defined as the accumulation of a person’s exposure to environmental factors over their lifetime2. The term came into being because of the recognition that the environment plays a major role in disease causation and manifestation; but a challenge to understanding that role better is the lack of characterisation of people’s environmental exposures. The term exposome was therefore conceived as the environmental complement to the human genome…

Dr Miranda Loh is head of environmental and public health at the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh.

Author: Loh M

Tags environmental medicine exposure limits health and safety

Occupational Health at Work October/November 2021 (vol. 18/3) pp32-35

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