Integrative Approaches in Environmental Health and Exposome Research: Epistemological and Practical Issues

Research on the relationship between health and the environment in a postgenomic context is increasingly aimed at understanding the various exposures as a whole, simultaneously taking into account data pertaining to the biology of organisms and the physical and social environment. Exposome research is a paradigmatic case of this new trend in environmental health studies.

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach focusing on the conceptual, epistemological, and sociological reflections in the latest research on environmental and social determinants of health and disease. It offers a combination of theoretical and practical approaches and the authors are scholars from a multidisciplinary background (epidemiology, geography, philosophy of medicine and biology, sociology). Crucially, the book balances the benefit and cost of the integration of biological and social factors when modelling aetiology of disease.

Élodie Giroux is Professor of philosophy of medicine at the philosophy department of Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and researcher at the Lyon Institute of Philosophical Research (Irphil). Her research interests and her main publications focus on the history of risk factor epidemiology, philosophy of epidemiology, causation in medicine and public health, health and disease concepts, and more recently precision medicine and integrative research in environmental health and exposomics.

Francesca Merlin is Permanent research fellow in philosophy of biology at CNRS. She holds a PhD in Philosophy (University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2009). Her research focuses on ontological and epistemological issues raised by central concepts in biology such as chance and probability, inheritance and epigenetics, in various biological disciplines. She is currently the leader of the ANR EnviroBioSoc project about the plurality of ways the environment is conceived throughout biomedical and social sciences studying environmentally induced diseases.

Yohan Fayet is Health Geographer (PhD) at the Human and Social Sciences Departement of the Centre Léon Bérard (Comprehensive Cancer Center in Lyon, France). He is interested in the analysis of spatial inequalities in health, through the multiple impact of physical, social and medical environments on health outcomes. He focuses on spatial inequalities in cancer and analyses potential challenges raised by innovations in oncology.