Bring health-work and health-environment into harmony. Action research on occupational and environmental cancers in the lower Rhône valley

Based on the experience of setting up an action-research programme on occupational and environmental cancers in Avignon, this article questions the relationship between occupational and environmental health, as well as the unequal attention paid to these two areas, including by institutions funding scientific research. The technical and political specificities of these two domains make them highly complementary and their close coordination desirable. Drawing its methodological strength from the analysis of small populations often highly exposed to well-identified contaminants, occupational health provides its ability to act at the source of many types of pollution: the place of production. Given its often highly publicized nature, environmental health has the potential to increase the politicization of health issues that fall within its purview. While occupational health is often presented as a simple subfield of environmental health, this article argues that placing these two co-constituent domains of the field of occupational and environmental health on an equal footing would improve our understanding of the field’s key issues, and ultimately be beneficial to public health.