Environmental health is anchored in our daily lives and gives rise to growing concerns. For 7 in 10 French people, the environment has an impact on health. The health crisis has accelerated this awareness, revealing the impact of the degradation of ecosystems on human health and our vulnerabilities in the face of the emergence of zoonoses.
The marginalization of environmental health in a curative-centered health system is no longer in line with these expectations and with the reality of the challenges of reducing health inequalities.
In a report presented to the Senate Social Affairs Committee, Mr. Bernard Jomier (SER - Paris) and Ms. Florence Lassarade (Les Républicains - Gironde), rapporteurs, propose adapting the political response to these cross-cutting issues through operational management and proactive, action closer to the territories and a deepening of knowledge to act more effectively.
Faced with siled management and insufficient political support, an interministerial delegate for global health should focus on the theme of “one health” (“One Health”) linking human, animal and plant health. The national commission for ethics and alerts in public health and the environment could be transformed into a defender of environmental health rights who can put the administration on notice.
While the main levers of action are at the territorial level, the rapporteurs propose to equip local elected officials, to deploy regional observatories in environmental health and to reaffirm the responsibility of local authorities in this area. They also call for the generalization of good practices such as health impact assessment approaches, according to the concept of healthy urban planning, in order to promote a concrete, positive and integrated local approach to environmental health.
Finally, the continuous development of knowledge on these subjects calls for a reinforced and coordinated research effort: France should quadruple the means it grants to it to be, per inhabitant, at the same level as the United States. The rapporteurs propose to create a specialized university hospital institute (IHU), to develop morbidity and mortality registers to study the impact of environmental factors and to disseminate this knowledge to act on behavior, through a site for the general public. .
The report is available at this address.
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