Environmental Health Perspectives - History

History

EHP was founded in 1972 as a vehicle for publishing conference proceedings in the nascent environmental health sciences. Its publisher, the NIEHS, had been established in 1969, and the inception of Earth Day in 1970 has been called the birth of the modern environmental movement. By the end of 1970, President Richard Nixon had signed the Clean Air Act Extension, which created regulatory programs governing National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), State Implementation Plans (SIPs), New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), and National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs). In 1972 the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments, or Clean Water Act, became law. With growing awareness of environmental health issues, the journal was conceptualized by then-NIEHS director David Rall as a means for rapidly disseminating information on the emerging field.

Over the next 22 years the journal published 100 monographs, most of which arose from symposium or conference proceedings. EHP adopted its current monthly news and research format in 1993. The goal of the new format was to not only continue publishing the best environmental health research but also foster discussion among researchers and to educate the public about environmental health issues.

"Traditionally, laboratory researchers have tended to communicate primarily with each other, and the dissemination of information to the public has been slow and haphazard," original EHP editors-in-chief Gary E.R. Hook and George Lucier wrote in an editorial introducing the inaugural issue of the reformatted EHP. "It is clear that enhanced communications could contribute to the avoidance of environmental crises through both increased understanding of the underlying science and the identification of potential problems before they become overwhelming, expensive, and perhaps irreversible."

The addition of editorials, commentaries, correspondence, and news sections provided the desired forum for discussion of environmental health information. The restructured journal also introduced several new formats for the publication of scientific manuscripts: research articles, brief reports, and research advances.

With the reformatted EHP, symposium and conference proceedings were published separately as EHP Supplements. This daughter series was discontinued in 2008. Today EHP publishes occasional special reports, collections, and proceedings.