Olden receives environmental public health awards. (NIEHS News).

The American Public Health Association (APHA), the world's oldest and largest organization of public health professionals, awarded its prestigious Calver Award to Kenneth Olden, director of the NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program. The award was presented at the association's annual meeting, held 11 November 2002 in Philadelphia.

The award is named for Homer Calver, a World War I medic, public health official, and environmental journalist. Calver was executive director of the APHA and editor of its journal, the American Journal of Public Health. He also established and edited the Environmental News Digest.

As a health officer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Calver brought the city through a diphtheria epidemic and secured a modern ordinance protecting the milk and food supply. Intrigued by European health exhibits he saw on a trip in 1930, he used the APHA to promote American exhibits combining accurate health information with showmanship. One such exhibit, "The Transparent Man," was visited at the 1939 New York World's Fair by 12 million people, a record for a health exhibit that has yet to be broken. The Calver Award was established in 1970, the year Calver died (and the year Earth Day was first observed).

In announcing Olden's award, APHA chair for the environmental section Captain Patrick O. Bohan (Retired) of the U.S. Public Health Service said, "The APHA's environmental section is pleased to recognize the tremendous accomplishments of Kenneth Olden over his more than ten years as director of the NIEHS and NTP, and over his decades in biomedical research. He has deepened the science of his agency at the same time he has broadened its relevance to public health. The recognition is richly deserved."

Since his appointment as director of the NIEHS in 1991, Olden has become a national spokesperson for improved public health through environmental health sciences, with special emphasis on partnerships with grassroots organizations and patient advocacy groups in charting programs of environmental research. He initiated NIEHS-sponsored town meetings throughout the nation that have been public sounding boards focusing on regional environmental health concerns as well as health effects specific to minorities and those of lower socioeconomic status that are caused by exposure to environmental pollutants.

Olden has also taken a leading role in founding the Environmental Genome Project to study individual susceptibility to environmental insults, and the National Center for Toxicogenomics, which applies advances in genetic technology to chemical testing studying environmentally related disease. As recipient of the Calver Award, Olden delivered the keynote address at the APHA's environmental section program at the annual meeting.

In another announcement, Olden has also been awarded the first Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Award, presented by the Cincinnati Area Lead Advisory Committee (CALAC). The award, presented in November at a reunion of families who have participated in local lead studies, acknowledges Olden's leadership role in addressing children's health issues, especially lead poisoning, and recognizes the role of the NIEHS in a number of children's health initiatives that have enhanced children's health in the Cincinnati area. CALAC is working with the local Community Lead Education and Reduction/AmeriCorps, or CLEARCorps, program to increase community awareness of lead hazards and lobby for passage of a local lead hazard control ordinance.