Special Issue "Environmental Legislation and Public Health"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Wendy E. Wagner
The University of Texas School of Law, 727 East Dean Keeton Street, Austin, Texas 78705, USA; Case Western Reserve University School of Law, 11075 East Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44106, USA
Website: http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/profile.php?id=wewagner
E-Mail: wwagner@law.utexas.edu
Interests: the use of science in environmental and health policy; the role of special interests in producing or influencing research used for regulation; the expression of limitations and uncertainty in policy-relevant research; disclosures of conflicts of interest and data-sharing in applied research

Dear Colleagues,

Scientists continue to discover disturbing connections between environmental toxicants and public health impacts. Legislation, however, often lags far behind these scientific discoveries and too often takes an incomplete approach to the problems.

In this Special Issue, contributors are encouraged to identify environmental health problems insufficiently addressed by current international, national, and/or local legislation. Environmental health risks include air and water pollution, pesticides, indoor air hazards, land contamination, consumer products including food, and drinking water contamination.

Contributors are also encouraged to discuss some of the more significant impediments to developing effective environmental legislation for these and related risks. Some of the impediments could include:

• the difficulties in focusing public attention and legislators on uncertain risks that affect the diffuse public
• the absence of advocates for legislation that addresses environmental threats that primarily impact the poor
• corrupt or unaccountable legislators
• the role of special interests (i.e., lead, asbestos, tobacco) in undermining the rigor and reliability of the science used for policy
• difficulties associated with adequately accounting for uncertainty and dynamism in science in developing legal requirements
• insufficient support of public health research (i.e., on nanotechnology)

Finally, contributors are encouraged to offer suggestions for how some of these challenges to public health legislation might be overcome in the future.

Prof. Dr. Wendy E. Wagner
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs).

• regulation
• science
• adaptive management
• conflicts of interest
• environmental justice
• uncertainty
• environmental risks
• public health