East Asia Monitor
UNU
e-Newsletter
Guest Editorial Comment: Professor Keichiro Fuwa, Senior Adviser
UNU Coastal Hydrosphere Project
'These are exiting times for environmental chemists in Asia and the Pacific. At UNU's recent Symposium on EDC Pollution from Agrochemicals, held in Hanoi, we saw that great progress has been made by research in this field all over the world. Researchers in our network have been at the forefront of this work in Asia and have achieved a high quality of results in their monitoring activities. It remains for us to direct our attention to revealing the future impacts of the chemicals that we have found in our environment. This will require a new approach to environmental chemistry, including the introduction of more multidisciplinary research to assess the effects of EDC pollution on humans and animals.
I have often observed that as we become more and more sophisticated as analytical chemists, we can find traces of every chemical in our environment. The question is what do those traces count for? And will they harm us or our descendents? These are the questions that we need to answer if we are to help our policy-makers to do their job.
It is inspiring to see the work of toxicologists and biologists in this field. These questions have been raised in the United States by Dr John Peterson Myers and his colleagues, and many of our Japanese colleagues at the National Institute of Environmental Studies (NIES), Ehime University and the University of Tokyo's Ocean Research Institute (ORI) are carrying out important research on the effects of EDC's on marine animals. This work was highlighted during our recent Symposium on EDC Pollution. We are also seeing the emergence of groundbreaking research on human exposure to EDC's in our East Asian Laboratories, particularly in Malaysia. We need to incorporate many lessons from their discoveries into our research on environmental pollution if we are to understand its full significance.'