ENVIRON IMPACT ASSESS REV 1990;10:309-314 309 ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND PUBLIC HEALTH: AN OVERVIEW RICHARD N. ANDREWS PATTI H. CLAYTON This special issue explores the impacts of environmental change on public health through a compilation of papers presented at the "Conference on Environmental Change and Public Health: The Next Fifty Years" sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. Part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the School of Public Health, the conference brought academicians, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners of environmental science and public health to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their mission was threefold: to present scientific information with respect to a set of environmental changes expected to occur over the next 10-50 years, to explore the impacts these changes may have on public health, and to discuss public policy responses and research needs necessary to sustain and promote public health in these changed conditions. The field of public health is concerned in principle with all threats to the health of human communities and, therefore, with all environmental changes that may significantly affect human health. These include all changes in human living conditions that are not genetically determined and thus are potentially preventable. A 1920 statement, for example, defined public health as: The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing services for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery necessary to ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health. (Charles Edward A. Winslow [1920], "The Untilled Fields of Public Health," Science 51 [1920]:23) © 1990 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 0195-9255/90/$3.50