环境诱发疾病的增加以及监管和安全措施的放松，对现有的健康和环境观提出了巨大挑战。有疾病集群的社区、乳腺癌发病率不断上升的女性，以及关注哮喘流行的有色人种，都对强调基因构成和个人生活方式实践作用的生物医学模型持批评态度。同样，科学家们对同事和政府未能充分解决环境健康问题并保护研究不受企业操纵失去了耐心。
Phil Brown特别关注乳腺癌、哮喘和海湾战争相关的健康状况——“有争议的疾病”，这些疾病在医学界和政治界引发了激烈的辩论，他展示了这些担忧如何发起了一场环境健康运动，从而彻底改变了科学思维和政策。在过去三十年关于有毒物质暴露的广泛行动之前，人们几乎没有机会获得信息。有同情心的专业人士寥寥无几，科学知识基础薄弱，政府机构基本上没有做好准备，外行不被认为是有用知识的承载者，普通人缺乏自己的发现和行动资源。
布朗认为，有组织的社会运动对于认识和采取行动抗击环境疾病至关重要。他的书借鉴了环境和医学社会学、环境正义、环境健康科学和社会运动研究，展示了公民科学联盟如何努力推翻占主导地位的流行病学范式。他对向公众提供科学发现的方式和政策不断变化的性质进行了探索，为健康和环境以及人、知识、权力和权威之间的关系提供了新的视角。
Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health
The increase in environmentally induced diseases and the loosening of regulation and safety measures have inspired a massive challenge to established ways of looking at health and the environment. Communities with disease clusters, women facing a growing breast cancer incidence rate, and people of color concerned about the asthma epidemic have become critical of biomedical models that emphasize the role of genetic makeup and individual lifestyle practices. Likewise, scientists have lost patience with their colleagues’ and government’s failure to adequately address environmental health issues and to safeguard research from corporate manipulation.
Focusing specifically on breast cancer, asthma, and Gulf War-related health conditions-“contested illnesses” that have generated intense debate in the medical and political communities-Phil Brown shows how these concerns have launched an environmental health movement that has revolutionized scientific thinking and policy. Before the last three decades of widespread activism regarding toxic exposures, people had little opportunity to get information. Few sympathetic professionals were available, the scientific knowledge base was weak, government agencies were largely unprepared, laypeople were not considered bearers of useful knowledge, and ordinary people lacked their own resources for discovery and action.
Brown argues that organized social movements are crucial in recognizing and acting to combat environmental diseases. His book draws on environmental and medical sociology, environmental justice, environmental health science, and social movement studies to show how citizen-science alliances have fought to overturn dominant epidemiological paradigms. His probing look at the ways scientific findings are made available to the public and the changing nature of policy offers a new perspective on health and the environment and the relationship among people, knowledge, power, and authority.
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