Training for Stakeholders: Evaluating Environmental and Health Risks

This manuscript provides an overview of a special training session offered during the Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) in Oradea, Romania. The training provided is the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s (ATSDR) Environmental Health and Land Reuse (EHLR) Basic Training Module 2: Evaluating Environmental and Health Risks. The purpose of the training is to promote health-focused redevelopment, known as Healthfields, by safely reusing contaminated land to improve community health outcomes. One goal of offering the training among brownfields experts participating in the ARW was to expand an existing North American-Eastern European collaboration focused on sharing best practices and resources related to land reuse that incorporates public health, particularly improving health outcomes as a result of redevelopment. The training topics include an overview of toxicology, epidemiology, risk assessment; Phase I and II environmental site assessment; and ATSDR’s Public Health Assessment program and process. Resources related to the evaluation of environmental and health risks are also provided in the training. Twenty-two ARW participants attended the training, 14 virtual participants from Ukraine and eight live participants from seven additional countries.