Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement

Phil Brown

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June, 2007
Cloth, 392 pages, 12 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-12948-0
$32.00 / £22.00

Foreword by Lois Gibbs


Preface: Toxic Exposures and the Challenge of Environmental Health


List of Abbreviations


Acknowledgments


1. Citizen-Science Alliances and Health Social Movements: Contested Illnesses and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm


2. Breast Cancer: A Powerful Movement and a Struggle for Science


3. Asthma, Environmental Factors, and Environmental Justice


4. Gulf War-Related Illnesses and the Hunt for Causation: The "Stress of War" Versus the "Dirty Battlefield"


5. Similarities and Differences Among Asthma, Breast Cancer, and Gulf War Illnesses


6. The New Precautionary Approach: A Public Paradigm in Progress


7. Implications of the Contested Illnesses Perspective


8. Conclusion: The Growing Environmental Health Movement


Notes


Bibliography


Index

About the Author

Phil Brown is professor of sociology and environmental studies at Brown University. He has been writing about environmental health since the mid-1980s, beginning with No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action, which focused on the Woburn childhood leukemia cluster. Since then he has studied many environmental groups and movements and has collaborated with environmental organizations on research. He is editor of Perspectives in Medical Sociology and co-editor of Social Movements in Health and Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine.Phil Brown is a professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University. He directs the Community Outreach Core of Brown's Superfund Basic Research Program and the Ethical and Social Implications component of Brown's National Science Foundation NIRT project in nanotechnology. His book No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (co-authored with Edwin J. Mikkelsen, Univ of California Pr, Hardcover (1990), Paperback (1997): $21.95) was very successful. It was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Science, Harvard Law Review, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Contemporary Sociology, and New England Journal of Medicine, among others. In the spring of 2002 we published Phil Brown's In the Catskills: A Century of the Jewish Experience in 'The Mountains,' which has sold 2,321 copies so far.

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