Research Ethics for Environmental Health

Research Ethics for Environmental Health explores the ethical basis of environmental health research and related aspects of risk assessment and control.

Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and that control is a matter of implementing standards that unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Coming from multiple disciplines and nine different countries, the contributors to this book critically examine a diverse range of ethical concerns in modern environmental health research.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental health, as well as researchers in applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, bioethics and those concerned with chemical and radiation protection.

Friedo Zölzer is professor of environmental sciences at the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at the University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. His main professional interests are radiological protection and environmental health, as well as related questions of ethics.

Gaston Meskens is a scientist, philosopher and artist. He works part-time with the Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Ghent, Belgium, and with the Science and Technology Studies group of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK-CEN.