[The Vector] Clean Energy News from Around the Country: Green Hospitals

The national hospital community gathered in Phoenix in early April 2011 for the most influential conference on sustainable health care, “CleanMed.” Hospital administrators, clinicians, businesses and organizations servicing the health care community, such as green builders, were in attendance.

The conference included a complimentary solar tour of the Phoenix VA Medical Center compliments of SunWize, a company that provides solar solutions for hospitals. The tour was to the largest solar carport installation in the U.S., which started in 2010 and has expanded to 4.45 MW of power.

“The conference is the most important sustainability event of the year for the health care sector,” says Peter Diamond, director of CleanMed. The event is sponsored each year by Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) and Practice Greenhealth. HCWH has successfully campaigned to reduce hospital emissions of dioxin and mercury (two toxic chemicals that contaminate people and ecosystems at hazardous levels), and to push for safer substitutes for some plastics in medical equipment. As a result of its initiatives, more hospitals have begun to preferentially purchase DEHP-free medical devices.

CleanMed’s highest honor, the Environmental Health Hero Award, was presented this year to Ted H. Schettler, MD, M.P.H. Dr. Schettler is very active in the medical and environmental science fields, and he often speaks at events and publishes works. He is also is Science Director at SEHN (Science & Environmental Health Network). His books include “Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment” (MIT Press 1999) and “In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development”(Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000), which describe what scientists know and suspect about environmental causes for a host of disorders from learning disabilities to cancer. He co-authored “Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging” which examines the lifetime influences of environmental factors on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Dr. Schettler and his co-authors contend that many diseases, and specifically Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are related to a number of features of modern society and linked to other serious health problems of modern times, which they label  the “western disease cluster.”

“Ecological medicine” is a term coined in 2001 by Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director at SEHN. This new field of inquiry and action is meant to reconcile the care and health of ecosystems, populations, communities, and individuals. The tension among ecosystem health, public health, and individual health is reaching a breaking point at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century and CleanMed puts focus on these issues.