{
  "abstract": "The ICOH Scientific Committee on the History of the Prevention of Occupational and Environmental Diseases is the convener of this symposium. The history of occupational epidemiology is being obscured. This process is accelerated through the publication of new findings that ignore a wealth of past knowledge, either through unintentional omission or even intentional insistence on only citing the most recent publications in the field. We do this at our own risk, undermining the foundations for a better understanding of outcomes in the context of changing exposures.Moreover, this missed history also provides a vital context for investigating new, innovative and effective interventions to prevent occupational disease. While the core of occupational epidemiology is to understand the relationship between workplace exposures and health outcomes, often this requires astute clinicians and epidemiologists to identify and document these associations. This is particularly so for previously undescribed relationships in the working environment. The history of occupational epidemiology has an abundance of stories of missed relationships and evidence of the recognition of sentinel cases and events that have proven to be the turning point in occupational health. These historical events provide epidemiologists with the understanding of the methods used to unearth these relationships, engaging with the scientific community to understand health effects and initiate sophisticated epidemiological research.In this mini-symposium, we will present sentinel occupational illness outbreaks from an historical perspective; the challenges of introducing work-related topics in the emerging discipline of public health; present brief biographies of leaders in early occupational epidemiology and examine access and lack of access to working populations in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and how this has shaped occupational epidemiology currently. Speakers will provide evidence as to why understanding the history of epidemiology is critical to preventing work-related diseases in the 21st century.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "La Isla Network, 2219 California Ave NW, #52, Washington, DC 20008, USA"
      ],
      "name": "Jason R Glaser"
    }
  ],
  "title": "8245376 Introduction to the mini-symposium: the forgotten history of occupational epidemiology",
  "uid": "988745fa-c5d0-553f-82c7-fec9187783fd"
}