{"id":12687,"date":"2025-11-05T16:45:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T21:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/?p=12687"},"modified":"2025-11-05T12:01:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T17:01:14","slug":"the-work-continues-ramazzini-days-2025-and-the-future-of-occupational-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/2025\/11\/05\/the-work-continues-ramazzini-days-2025-and-the-future-of-occupational-health\/","title":{"rendered":"The Work Continues: Ramazzini Days 2025 and the Future of Occupational Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

C<\/span>arpi, a medieval city in Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, hosted something urgent last weekend\u2014not in the sense of panic, but in the way serious work becomes urgent when the stakes are clear. The Collegium Ramazzini gathered for its annual conference, October 24-26, and what emerged was less a celebration of past achievements than a hard-eyed reckoning with present catastrophes and a collective commitment to do something about them.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Collegium Ramazzini<\/a>\u00a0is an international scientific academy comprised of\u00a0physicians and scientists from 45 countries. It was founded in 1982 by Professors Irving J. Selikoff<\/a> of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and Professor Cesare Maltoni<\/a> of the University of Bologna. It is named in honor of Dr. Bernardino Ramazzini<\/a> (1633-1714), Professor of Medicine in the Universities of Modena and Padova, the Father of Occupational Medicine. The mission of the Collegium Ramazzini is to\u00a0increase scientific knowledge of the environmental and occupational causes of disease\u00a0and to transmit this knowledge to decision-makers, the media and the global public to\u00a0protect public health, prevent disease and save lives.<\/p>\n

The fellowship of occupational and environmental health scientists\u2014representing India, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Italy, Zambia, Albania, Ghana, and dozens of other nations\u2014spent three days methodically working through the terrain where climate, extraction, industry, and human biology collide. The papers weren’t gentle. They described lead-acid battery recycling operations poisoning children in Africa. Neonicotinoid pesticides causing brain damage in rodent studies that regulators are now allowed to ignore in favor of untested computational models. Arsenic emissions in Idaho being reinterpreted upward so that children accumulate a lifetime cancer risk in sixteen years. The soft-sell version would call it “awareness-raising.” That’s not what this was.<\/p>\n

The papers weren’t gentle. They described lead-acid battery recycling operations poisoning children in Africa. Neonicotinoid pesticides causing brain damage in rodent studies that regulators are now allowed to ignore in favor of untested computational models. Arsenic emissions in Idaho being reinterpreted upward so that children accumulate a lifetime cancer risk in sixteen years.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What struck observers was less the litany of harms\u2014though the litany is staggering\u2014and more the quality of determination in the room. This is an organization that could comfortably retreat into academic conferences, publishing findings for other academics to cite. Instead, it’s doing something harder: insisting that evidence matters at the policy table, that frameworks like occupational justice aren’t academic luxuries but tools for redistribution, and that the Collegium has a responsibility to speak when regulatory capture and cost-cutting threaten to unmake decades of hard-won protections.<\/p>\n

The Themes Running Through<\/h2>\n

Several currents moved through the program. One was the architecture of exposure: how hazards don’t distribute randomly, but cluster where power is thinnest. Presentations on lead poisoning in low- and middle-income countries weren’t abstract epidemiology. Bruce Lanphear’s work on the enduring legacy of lead documented how nations with resources have largely eliminated the poison, while children in Kabwe, Zambia, and Shymkent, Kazakhstan continue to bear the burden. Carlos Santos-Burgoa’s framing of “private institutional capture” under constrained conditions named what’s actually happening\u2014not ignorance, but choice. The choice to let hazards persist where they are profitable and where the people affected have the least political weight.<\/p>\n

Another current was the risk of displacement: the way climate transition and energy security narratives are being weaponized to bypass health protections. Margrit von Braun’s presentation on the Stibnite mine in Idaho crystallized this. The mine will produce antimony (defense), gold (profit), and arsenic (toxicity). Idaho’s regulatory apparatus has reinterpreted its own standards\u2014using “dose averaging”\u2014to justify cancer risks that would be unthinkable in a wealthy suburb. The reframing was not accidental. It is happening as federal and state agencies face pressure to relax protections in the name of strategic minerals and clean energy. The irony of poisoning children to power solar panels was not lost on anyone in the room.<\/p>\n

The mine will produce antimony (defense), gold (profit), and arsenic (toxicity). Idaho’s regulatory apparatus has reinterpreted its own standards\u2014using “dose averaging”\u2014to justify cancer risks that would be unthinkable in a wealthy suburb. The reframing was not accidental. It is happening as federal and state agencies face pressure to relax protections in the name of strategic minerals and clean energy.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A third thread was the adequacy of our tools: whether the science we have built is sufficient for the hazards we’re facing. The discussion of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs)\u2014replacing animal testing with in vitro cell-based assays and computational models\u2014revealed genuine tension. These methods might reduce animal suffering and accelerate some findings. But as the OECD itself warned, there are “gaps in coverage of neurodevelopment processes and cell types” that “may result in lower sensitivity and specificity.” The concern isn’t abstract. Neonicotinoid pesticides show clear developmental neurotoxicity in animal studies. The question of whether computational models will catch what rodent brains are telling us remains open. Meanwhile, regulators are moving forward anyway.<\/p>\n

Global Collaboration in Practice<\/h2>\n

The Collegium’s composition tells you something about its approach. Yes, there are scientists from wealthy nations\u2014the United States, Canada, Sweden. But the fellowship also includes researchers from India, Zimbabwe, Taiwan, Albania, Ghana, and a dozen other countries where occupational hazards aren’t a policy problem but a daily reality. This isn’t virtue signaling. It means the organization’s priorities are shaped by people who live in places where lead exposure, e-waste dismantling, and heat stress aren’t statistics but conditions affecting their neighbors.<\/p>\n

The program reflected this. Vidhya Venugopal’s work on occupational heat stress and women workers wasn’t filed under “special populations”\u2014it was central. The research on the informal e-waste sector in Ghana, on asbestos exposure in Eastern Europe, on solar ultraviolet exposure in Italian agricultural workers\u2014these came from scholars who understand these hazards from the ground up. Yonah Amster’s framework paper on occupational justice, presented at the opening session, set a tone: this isn’t about damage control or industry compliance. It’s about advancing equity in occupational health as a principle, not an afterthought.<\/p>\n

What that looks like in practice is researchers from different continents collaborating on shared problems. Marina Steiner’s work on lead exposure assessment in Kazakhstan’s smelter communities. Stephan B\u00f6se-O’Reilly’s ethical analysis of mineral extraction and children’s health in Zambia. These aren’t isolated case studies\u2014they’re part of a conversation about what happens when the global economy externalizes its costs onto communities with the least power to refuse.<\/p>\n

The Award Winners<\/h2>\n

This year, the Collegium recognized two scientists whose work has been foundational to the field’s intellectual and moral foundation: Dr. Philip Landrigan<\/strong> for the Ramazzini Award and Dr. Henry A. Anderson, III<\/strong> for the Selikoff Award.<\/p>\n

Landrigan’s career spans nearly five decades of consequential work on the hazards children face\u2014and on the gap between what science establishes and what policy allows. In the early 1970s, he took on ASARCO, the massive smelting company dominating El Paso, Texas, by testing the blood of children near the plant. He found that 60% of children living within a mile of the smelter had elevated lead levels. More provocatively, he demonstrated what everyone knows now but regulators resisted then: even small amounts of lead exposure damage developing brains and lowers IQ. A later study tied the dots further, correlating childhood lead exposure to lifetime earning potential\u2014quantifying what looks like an aggregate income loss of over $40 billion annually in the United States alone.<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, Landrigan took on ASARCO, the massive smelting company dominating El Paso, Texas, by testing the blood of children near the plant. He found that 60% of children living within a mile of the smelter had elevated lead levels.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That research wasn’t academic. It moved policy. Landrigan’s work was instrumental in the government mandate phasing out lead in gasoline beginning in 1975 and the federal ban on lead paint in 1978. By 2005, lead levels in American children had dropped 88%. Victory matters. It also matters that it took decades and that the problem persists globally\u2014in the places Carpi was discussing last weekend.<\/p>\n

His work on pesticides followed a similar arc. In 1988, at Senator Patrick Leahy’s request, Landrigan led a National Academy of Sciences study examining whether pesticide exposure standards\u2014designed for 150-pound adults\u2014adequately protected children. The 1993 report, *Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children*, was among the first to demonstrate that children are uniquely susceptible to pesticide harm. It called for standards ten times more stringent than those in effect. Again: the science was clear. The policy response has been glacial.<\/p>\n

Post-9\/11, Landrigan testified before Congress on asbestos exposure in lower Manhattan, disagreeing publicly with the EPA’s assessment of risk. He invoked thirty or forty years of research showing that smaller fibers penetrate most deeply into the lungs\u2014and argued that tiny particles shouldn’t be dismissed as harmless just because they were small. He was right. He also knew that saying so publicly meant standing against federal agencies and industry pressure.<\/p>\n

Anderson’s contributions run deeper than most recognize. He trained under Irving Selikoff at Mount Sinai\u2014and has spent his career following the principles he absorbed there. A Collegium Fellow since 1990, he’s authored more than 275 publications on the field’s essential problems: asbestos, lead, mercury, PCBs, electronic cigarettes. His research has tracked hazards across worker populations\u2014automotive mechanics, farmers, teachers, custodians, fishermen\u2014the people whose exposures don’t make headlines but accumulate daily.<\/p>\n

But Anderson’s work extends well beyond publication. He served as Chief Medical Officer of Wisconsin’s Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where a graduate student award now bears his name), and served on countless editorial boards and national committees. Since 2009, he’s been on the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health\u2014a position President Biden elevated to Chair in 2021. Within the Collegium itself, he’s served on the Executive Council and led the Awards Committee with what the organization describes as “caring and thoughtful leadership.”<\/p>\n

This matters because it reveals what the Collegium values: not just the individual researcher but the institutional builder. Anderson has spent decades ensuring that rigorous science reaches audiences, that younger scientists find mentorship, that committees actually function with integrity. He embodies what it means to follow Selikoff’s example\u2014to hold the work together when it would be easier to retreat into specialist isolation.<\/p>\n

Both men represent something the Collegium seems increasingly insistent about: you can’t separate the science from the advocacy, not when the consequences of getting it wrong\u2014or of pretending not to know\u2014fall on children and workers. The distinction between “scientist” and “advocate” is a luxury. When regulations are being rewritten and protections dismantled, the choice to remain neutral is a choice with casualties.<\/p>\n

Landrigan’s path shows what it costs to take on industry and agencies. Anderson’s shows what it costs to hold an institution and a field accountable to its principles over decades. Both are being honored for refusing the easier path.<\/p>\n

What’s at Stake?<\/h2>\n

The conference ended with the familiar obligation to summarize and strategize. There were calls for better integration of occupational exposure into “exposome” science, understanding the full constellation of environmental factors shaping health outcomes. There were discussions about how regulatory capture works and what accountability might look like. There were concrete proposals: the Collegium could issue a statement on threats to children’s health from both new synthetic chemicals and “old chemicals” like arsenic and lead\u2014substances whose toxicity is established but whose restrictions are being rescinded under political pressure.<\/p>\n

What stayed with observers, though, wasn’t the resolutions. It was the quality of attention in the room. These are scientists trained to read data, to live with uncertainty, to hedge their claims. But there’s no hedging in Carpi this October. The lead is still in the soil. The children in Kabwe are still exposed. The arsenic limits are still being rewritten. The neonicotinoids are still coating seeds at industrial scale. And the Collegium Ramazzini\u2014a modest organization with no massive funding apparatus, no media platform, just the authority of evidence and the credibility of its fellows\u2014has decided that staying quiet is not an option.<\/p>\n

That’s not enthusiasm in the conventional sense. It’s something more difficult and more necessary: the determination to do work that matters when the cost of getting it wrong is real and when those costs fall on people who didn’t get to choose whether they’d be exposed.<\/p>\n

Drs. Landrigan and Anderson are being honored for work that exemplifies this commitment. Thousands of hours spent documenting, analyzing, advocating. The willingness to stand in front of regulatory bodies and say “the evidence is clear” when clarity costs something. That’s what the Collegium is recognizing\u2014and what it’s committing to sustain.<\/p>\n

The work continues. In Carpi, it has both witnesses and momentum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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