People, Places and Pathogens
Published 13 June 2012
Event 21 June 2012
Prevention is still better than cure: How science can support healthier environments for the world's poorest people.
A renewed drive to improve the living conditions of the world’s most vulnerable people is the best way to tackle the continuing burden of waterborne disease, according to a leading public health specialist.
Professor Huw Taylor, founder of the University of Brighton's Environment and Public Health Research Unit, will give an inaugural lecture on People, Places and Pathogens on 21 June. Professor Taylor, who did his undergraduate degree in microbiology, said that the science of medical microbiology has delivered enormous benefits for human health. However, he believes these global health gains have been far from equitable and that re-directing our research efforts to support the delivery of safe drinking water and effective sanitation could help to lift the threat of waterborne disease from the lives of millions of children.
He said: "To focus solely on the biological agents of specific disease, at the expense of the environmental, social and economic conditions in which they flourish, is to blind ourselves to better ways to achieve better health."
His lecture will draw on his own experiences of environmental interventions to tackle waterborne diseases in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. He will demonstrate their often complex causes and show how specialist and local knowledge can be brought together to tackle them.
Professor Taylor began his academic career as a PhD student at the University of Liverpool investigating wastewater treatment in Portugal. He then worked on a postdoctoral research project in Northeast Brazil, under the guidance of Professor Duncan Mara of the University of Leeds.
Following a period as assistant director of the Northern School of Public Health in Manchester, he took up a lectureship in the University of Brighton's Department of Civil Engineering in 1993 and in 1998 he established the Environment and Public Health Research Unit. This is now a flourishing specialist group within the School of Environment and Technology's Aquatic Research Centre.
During the past 20 years, Professor Taylor has worked with colleagues from Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, the USA, Brazil, Nigeria, Malawi, Haiti and Bangladesh, and for the past ten years has led the university's MSc in Water and Environmental Management.
He said microbiologists do not hold all the answers to tackling infectious disease: "I believe that science has a key role to play in improving human welfare, but that it is teams of diverse talents that offer the best chance of delivering science that counts."
Attending the lecture
The lecture is free and everyone is welcome. Find out more and book a place...
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