TIN: ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION AND HEALTH EFFECTS.

The Encyclopedia of Environmental Health contains numerous examples of policy options and environmental health practices that have worked and thus can guide programs in other countries or regions. It includes a wide range of tools and strategies that can assist communities and countries in assessing environmental health conditions, monitoring progress of intervention implementation and evaluating outcomes. The approach of the chapter on tin and organotin compounds established academic disciplines, from clinical medicine to epidemiology, chemistry and biology to toxicology, economics to political science and ethics for evaluation of environmental health. The interdisciplinary nature of the pursuit underscores the need to synthesize the results of increasingly narrow academic disciplines and to incorporate their contributions into a big-picture understanding of the dependence of our health on the environment. Integrative assessment, whether qualitative or quantitative, is a useful approach in environmental health. This work seeks to conceptualize environmental health more clearly, to describe the best available scientific methods that can be used in characterizing and managing environmental health risks, to extend the field of environmental health through new theoretical perspectives and heightened appreciation of social, economic and political contexts, and to encourage a richer analysis in the field through examples of diverse experiences in dealing with the health-environment interface. The approach is to avoid gloom and doom and instead provide a framework for further research that is based on valuable ideas and experiences from different parts of the world.