An important step to environmental health
Mars Di Bartolomeo,
Minister of Health
Luxembourg
During the last few decades, the pattern of diseases we have to face has considerably changed: almost one person out of three will get a cancer during his life. Neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson syndrome, depressions have not only increased but affect more and more young people. Respiratory diseases including asthma become more and more common. Almost forty percent of our children suffer from allergies, hormonal or endocrine disturbances and young couples are increasingly having fertility problems.
Although modern medicine has made considerable efforts in therapying and often healing these diseases, very little progress has been made in preventing these modern diseases. Causal factors often turn out to be found in the outdoor or even indoor environment, where people are increasingly exposed to numerous chemicals and biological or physical stressors. The Paris Appeal, an international call on diseases caused by chemical pollution and signed by numerous international scientists, Nobel Prize winners, around 1000 NGO’s and 2 million European doctors aims to ban hazardous products, regulate or eliminate polluting substances and apply the precautionary principle to potentially dangerous chemicals.
As a Minister of Health I am convinced that the definition of health is not only the avoiding of illnesses or diseases but health should be a state of good condition and of well being that allows people to enjoy their lives.
As a Minister of Social Security I believe that the best patient is the person that never becomes a patient and stays healthy. Both statements lead to the principle of precaution that means a way of life avoiding as far as possible all the bad influences among which tobacco, abuse of alcohol, obesity, the lack of physical activity. We have identified as well a lot of environmental risk factors mostly known from outdoor accidental pollutions like for instance the dioxin-contamination of Seveso in the seventies. Less known but not less dangerous are the indoor contaminations that a number of people, including old people but also children, babies or even unborn babies face daily in their own homes, especially in their sleeping rooms.
When the experiment of an environmental medicine and indoor air investigation service within the Health Ministry was started in the early nineties by the former Health Minister, Johny Lahure, nobody expected the new created service to develop in the way it did over the last decade.
The development of a “Service of Environmental Medicine” inside the Health Ministry of Luxembourg that takes care of the indoor air quality investigation over the last decade gives us a very pragmatic and practice orientated view of indoor air quality in relation to environmental health. This “infield” experience gives us a complementary view to the numerous studies and results of research and should therefore be taken into consideration. The specificity of the Luxembourg model of environmental medicine and indoor air quality is not the development of the different services or institutions involved in environmental health but the tight cooperation between them, creating thus a multi-disciplinary network of specialists that act as a team.
After more than ten years of practice and of increasing multi-disciplinary teamwork, we just begin to have a far-sighted view of the indoor situation concerning pollutants and their relation to health disturbances. At least far-sighted enough to support that long-term chronic exposure to low concentrations of chemical pollutants, physical stressors or microbiological contaminants can be the origin or at least the trigger for a large variety of health symptoms or diseases.
Therefore, when the idea was brought to me by Jan Huss and our department of Environmental Medicine to organize a congress under the Luxembourg Presidency of the European Union on behalf of environmental medicine and indoor air quality, I didn’t hesitate even if the delay for organisation was very short. But I considered it an important opportunity to take up the “relay” from the Dutch who had organized a congress under their Presidency the year before at Egmont-aan-Zee and to give a follow-up to the European Commissions Environmental & Health Action Plan 2004-2010 as well as to the Environment and Health Ministers Conference of Budapest in June 2004.
The Luxemburg congress was aimed to give a very practical view of the situation of environmental health and thus to introduce a new aspect since the former conferences unanimously agreed with the principle of environmental pollutants causing health problems. Therefore, we invited expert speakers who look back on long-time practical experience either in environmental medicine or in indoor air investigation.
I would like to thank all the participants for their presence at the congress that contributed to the success of the congress and especially the expert speakers for preparing their precious lectures in such a short delay.
The congress and the present reader retrace the actual knowledge of environmental medicine and indoor air quality and describe the way to a sustainable product policy that will avoid or at least reduce any further indoor air contamination.
The challenge is clearly described, and the congress as well as the present reader just constitute a small part towards the achievement of a healthy indoor air quality, a reduction of “man-made” diseases and by that an improvement of the general health condition.
Mars di Bartolomeo
Minister of Health
Luxembourg