www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org is published daily by Environmental Health Sciences, a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 to help increase public understanding of emerging scientific links between environmental exposures and human health. EHS publishes 3 websites:

www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org
www.OurStolenFuture.org
www.ProtectingOurHealth.org (in partnership with the Collaborative for Health and the Environment)

The front page of www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org contains three columns: new news, new science and new reports:

New News:
www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org aggregates links to articles in the world press about environmental health, with daily updates. Topics carried include a broad array of issues in environmental health, including: chemical contamination, water quantity and quality, air pollution, sewage, Mad Cow disease, and genetic engineering, etc. as well as climate change and biodiversity stories with a health dimension. We make a special effort to find media coverage of new scientific findings related to these issues. We do not cover pure energy, 'critter stories,' or animal rights. Anything covered should have, at least implicitly, a link to human or ecosystem health.

We look for all relevant stories in the mainstream press that are published on the web. Most of our sources are daily newspapers and weekly or monthly news magazines. They include English language newspapers with international audiences like the New York Times, the London Guardian and the Jakarta Post; the major newswires like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse; as well as medium-sized newspapers and small locals published in towns across the US, the UK, India, Australia and New Zealand. We will sometimes post links to radio or television stories. We also cover scientific journals that carry articles relevant to environment and health, such as Science and Nature, and science magazines like New Scientist and Science News. While we do survey several chemical and medical publications like Chemical & Engineering News, we do not post articles from the environmental press nor business trade press.

Within that universe, EHS publishes what we find, irrespective of the opinion or viewpoint expressed, or whether or not material in the article is consistent with our understanding of current science. We often publish several articles from different newspapers covering the same story, as well as multiple editorials and op-eds about the same subject. We take this approach based on the belief that readers who come to EnvironmentalHealthNews.org want to see a wide range of how issues are being covered by the mainstream press.

Usually we carry the headline and lede as they ran in the original publication. We alter them only when changes would convey to readers more precisely what the article is about and where it took place. We want to make it easy for EHN readers to decide quickly whether it is worth their while to follow the link to the original.

At the bottom of the left-most column are links to More News from Today and Editorials/Opinion from Today. Often you can find as many as 80 additional stories via these links, sometimes over 100. The teasers sandwiched between the two links provide some indication of what you’ll find.

New Science:
This column contains paragraph summaries of newly published scientific findings from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, with links to more in-depth synopses at one of our other websites, www.OurStolenFuture.org (scientific findings specifically about endocrine disruption) or www.ProtectingOurHealth.org (scientific findings about a broader range of human health and environment related research). Often these synopses are posted before the research is covered by the mainstream press.

New Reports:
This column provides links to new reports published on the web by organizations working on environmental health issues. Most of the links are to work by not-for-profit organizations. Some links are to government reports.

 

EHS is a project of the Virginia Organizing Project ( Charlottesville, VA). Gifts to VOP for EHS qualify as charitable contributions. If you are interested in helping EHS expand its coverage of news and science related to environmental health, please let us know.

EHS has received grants from:

  • The Jenifer Altman Foundation
  • The Beldon Fund
  • The Homeland Foundation
  • The John Merck Fund
  • The Alida R. Messinger Charitable Lead Trust
  • The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
  • The V.K. Rasmussen Foundation

Software driving the EHN website has been developed from the ground up using Semantic Web principles, in a partnership of Siderean Software, the Edgerton Foundation, and EHS. All data on the site are stored using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which lends itself nicely to the site's following functions:

  • aggregation of content about health and the environment from distributed, heterogeneous sources.
  • creation and aggregation of value-added metadata about the content.
  • effective and flexible navigation and search over a large and growing repository of content metadata.
  • creation of customized syndicated feeds of the value-added metadata for delivery across diverse media platforms.

More information about the underlying software technology is available from Siderean Software.

Contact information:

www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org
Environmental Health Sciences
619 B. East High Street
Charlottesville, Virginia. 22902
USA

John Peterson Myers, Ph.D.
CEO, Environmental Health Sciences

For comments, questions or suggestions about the site:
feedback@environmentalhealthnews.org