Abstract

In 2001, Pekkanen and Pearce outlined the fundamental difficulties facing environmental epidemiology. These included the need for new methodologies and interdisciplinary to study connections between global environmental change and health, complex mixtures of a large number of correlated exposures, small effect sizes that can result in studies that are inconclusive in the context of residual confounding. They also cautioned against letting the importance of public health influence research topics in favour of new technology. The exact measurement of exposures in space and time, together with these remarkable advancements in statistical methods to derive valuable information on mixtures of correlated exposures, continue to be some of the major problems in the area today. The availability of data and the quick rate of technological advancement have made the Prioritizing what must be done over what may be done is more urgently needed to maximise public health benefits.

Keywords: Environment; Epidemiology; Demographics; Urbanization