GIJS VAN SEVENTER ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SEMINAR SERIES: Modern Food Systems, the Environment and Human Health
Why Food Is Not Enough: Environmental Enteropathy, Mycotoxins, the Gut Microbiome, and Malnutrition
Speaker: Jeffrey K. Griffiths MD MPH&TM
Department of Public Health and Family Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine
The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University
Director of Feed the Future Nutrition Innovation Laboratory- Africa
February 27, 2015
12:45 – 1:45 PM
BUSM Room L112
Summary:
Stunting, wasting, and conditions such as anemia remain powerful brakes on human potential. Historically, the global response to under-nutrition has the improvement of caloric, vitamin, and micronutrient intake. While the provision of an adequate and diverse diet is still a critical element to eliminating malnutrition, we now understand that environmentally-mediated conditions – poor water and sanitation, mycotoxin contamination of foods, and harmful gut microbiomes – limit the capacity of food-based approaches to “solve” undernutrition. This talk will contextualize these conditions – what is known, what is not – and how they interact with disease such as malaria. Attendees will leave with an appreciation of how conditions such as enteric enteropathy (also called acquired environmental enteric dysfunction); dysfunctional perturbations of the gut microbiome; and aflatoxin (a mycotoxin) exposure affect human nutrition and health. They will also have greater insight into the major evidence gaps, research needs, and policy opportunities that exist.
Jeffrey K. Griffiths MD MPH&TM has worked at the intersection of health and nutrition for 30 years. Current projects are based in Uganda, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Malawi. He has also worked in Haiti, Bangladesh, and Ecuador. He is a Professor of Public Health and of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and holds adjunct appointments at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the School of Engineering, and in Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. By training he is a pediatrician, internist, and infectious diseases physician with expertise in infectious diseases and the influence of the environment on health. For many years Dr. Griffiths has been involved in US water policy and has thrice testified before the US Senate. He is the immediate past Chair of the Drinking Water Committee of the US EPA’s Science Advisory Board, and was a founding member of the interdisciplinary Water: Systems, Science and Society (WSSS) program at Tufts University.
