Strategies to Reduce Environmental Cancer Risk: Plastic & Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals

Content Disclaimer: The Iowa Cancer Consortium, the state of Iowa’s comprehensive cancer coalition, is a non-partisan, non-political organization and does not use state or federal funds to engage in lobbying. The Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force’s role is to connect partners with resources, knowledge, and collaboration opportunities that help them succeed in practicing cancer control work through an environmental and occupational health lens, and vice versa. The opinions and interpretation of the information shared by speakers and attendees in this webinar series do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Iowa Cancer Consortium, its board of directors, members, or staff.
The Iowa Cancer Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force is hosting a summer webinar series, “Strategies to Reduce Environmental Cancer Risk,” that highlights actions from the individual to the institutional level that can be taken to better understand and reduce environmental and occupational exposures to cancer-causing substances.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals have been used in plastic since the chemical revolution of the 1940s, and in the third part of this series, Dr. Emily Hilz, research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, will be speaking about the health impacts of exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in plastic and other commonly used products and how their informed use can help reduce exposure. Dr. Hilz studies the inter- and transgenerational effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Andrea Gore. Her work primarily assesses the cognitive, neurological, and genetic impacts of EDCs using animal models. Dr. Hilz received a National Research Service Award for this work in 2022, and is one of the Phase 1 winners of the HHS OWH EDC-Innovator award for her outreach work developing a web-app to screen for endocrine disruptors in personal care products. She is a member of the U.S. Endocrine Society, which is an organization of researchers at both the national and international level that aims in part to increase awareness and regulation of endocrine disruptors.
The goal of the Iowa Cancer Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force is to connect partners with resources, knowledge, and collaboration opportunities that help them succeed in practicing cancer control work through an environmental and occupational health lens, and vice versa. Learn more about the Task Force here: canceriowa.org...