Two international societies fostering the scientific foundation of the public health discipline of environmental health met this fall on the theme of Science, Population Diversity, Caution and Precaution.

The International Society of Exposure Analysis and the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology met together in Paris, Sept. 2-6, 2006, to discuss science and policy around three main themes.  The themes were:
*    The relationship between early-life exposures, early damage to developing systems, and chronic disease in later life;
*    The interaction between environmental exposures and genes -- in particular, how understanding the diversity of gene expression in humans and testing the gene-environment interaction will improve the study of environmentally-caused disease; and
*    The scientific and societal basis of protective public health policy developed when scientific information on environmental hazards is incomplete or uncertain.

Members of the two societies publish their research in the official
journals, The Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology
and Epidemiology.  For more information, please see
http://www.iseaweb.org and http://www.iseepi.org/, respectively.

The locations of future individual and jointly sponsored conferences, through 2009, are also listed at these two Web sites. They are in the United States and abroad.