Why the Journal of Environmental Medicine?
The possibe adverse consequences of environmental exposures to physical, chemical and biological factors are a matter of growing concern amongst health professionals and regulatory agencies, the media, and the general population. Until recently, this concern was largely manifest by the exponential growth in nonmedical fields such as ecology, experimental toxicology, risk assessment and environmental health sciences. To a surprisingly large extent, the health impacts of environmental toxicants have not been thoroughly evaluated from a medical perspective, with the exception of specific fields such as epidemiology or occupational medicine.
Environmental Medicine can be defined as the area of medical practice devoted to a better understanding and appraisal of the aetiology, identification, medical diagnosis, management and prevention of human health disorders related to hazardous exposures in the workplace, home and outdoor environment. It includes the identification of susceptible patient groups, clinical diagnosis and treatment, risk analysis, and regulatory issues. Hazardous environmental exposures consist of an enormous variety of agents, including physical factors such as noise, radioactivity and electromagnetic fields; chemical factors such as pesticides, heavy metals and asbestos; and biological agents such as mycobacterium, fungi and viruses. The Journal of Environmental Medicine is primarily intended to be a scientific forum for medical doctors and other health professionals who are interested or involved in these issues from a medical perspective, as no such broad forum is currently available to the medical community.
Each issue of the Journal of Environmental Medicine will include several types of papers. Review papers are expected to be mostly solicited by the editors, but potential authors are welcome to submit reviews on timely and key issues. Review papers will be published either as regular single reviews, as twin papers presenting opposing views on a particular topic under the heading "Controversies in Environmental Medicine", or as a series of three or four papers dealing with different aspects of the same topic under the heading "Minisymposia in Environmental Medicine". The Journal of Environmental Medicine will also devote ample space for the publication of original high-quality research work, either as full-length papers or short communications. All medical aspects of environmental and occupational disease, including medical diagnosis,