Abstract:

This paper describes the relevance of environmental toxicology as a discipline to be taught to students seeking work in the public or private sectors. Environmental toxicology, which includes the conduct of human and environmental risk assessments, is of critical importance to protect human health against chemicals and/or drugs that contaminate the environment or may pose a threat to the population in the aftermath of a chemical incident. Its study provides an overview of risk assessment, human exposure and health protection that is relevant for future professionals that want to work in the health sector. Comprehensive reviews have shown that toxicological and environmental expertise is pivotal in the appropriate control, management, treatment and disposal of chemicals based on the toxicity and risks of these substances. This toxicological work, in turn, reduces human health risks produced by chemical pollutants by reducing pollution of soil, water, air and food after implementation of protection, recovery and restoration programmes. However, recent statistics about the status of toxicology education in academic institutions within the “European Higher Education Area” have shown that environmental toxicology is not taught in sufficient detail in health science courses such as pharmacy or medicine. Therefore, European Union (EU)’s academics should develop and offer toxicological education that will play an essential part of the education of future health and public health workers due to the large burden of disease and mortality caused by environmental pollutants. This paper reviews a highly successful short training course on environmental toxicology specifically designed for postgraduate pharmacists at the University of Alcalá (UAH, Spain), which has been adapted to train undergraduate medical sciences students at De Montfort University (DMU, UK) in 2015/16. This experience demonstrated that this short training course could be easily adopted by EU human health academic institutions to provide basic training on environmental toxicology. Our teaching group is also exploring the development of future courses and training in Environmental Toxicology for undergraduate and postgraduate students at DMU, which are also discussed in this paper.

Keywords:

Environmental toxicology education, postgraduate pharmacists, risk assessment, short training course.