Expand+GEOL20240 Medical Geology
Academic Year 2021/2022
This module explores the multiple linkages between human health and the geosphere. Medical Geology is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field within the geosciences. This module explores the com...

Hide-GEOL20240 Medical Geology
Academic Year 2021/2022
This module explores the multiple linkages between human health and the geosphere. Medical Geology is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field within the geosciences. This module explores the complex relationships between human health and disease, focusing on those aspects of the surface and near-surface environment that reflect underlying geological controls. Topics include health-relevant soil and water geochemistry, food-soil-rock connections, the role of soil and rock type in determining local to regional scale excesses and deficiencies in essential and trace elements, geochemical controls on metal speciation and bioavailability, natural processes that influence atmospheric dust and other particulate loads (e.g. desert dusts, volcanic emissions, naturally occurring carcinogenic minerals such as some asbestos-group minerals, nanominerals), naturally occurring radioactivity (e.g. uranium, radon), synergistic inter-actions between multiple geogenic pollutants (e.g lead, arsenic and uranium) in groundwater and implications for human health, biomineralisation processes, geophagy, the interactions between minerals and microbes including current research on the antimicrobial properties of certain minerals, the use of techniques with roots in geochemistry (e.g. heavy stable isotopes) in medical science.

Learning Outcomes:
The learning outcomes of this elective module are to provide undergraduate students who have an interest in Health Science and Medicine with:
(i) an improved knowledge of how naturally occurring Earth materials (e.g. carcinogenic minerals, geogenic contaminants in groundwater, bedrocks and soils) can impact on human health and disease,
(ii) a better appreciation of the complex pathways through which humans can be exposed to both excesses and deficiencies of essential and trace elements via multiple processes involving the food-soil-rock nexus and water-rock interactions,
(iii) the variety of potential exposure pathways including direct and indirect ingestion of geological contaminants, inhalation of airborne dusts and harmful but naturally occurring gases (e.g. radon),
(iv) an understanding of how the speciation and therefore the bioavailability of certain heavy metals varies in a range of geological and geochemical environments and finally
(v) how methods that were originally developed in the field of geochemistry (e.g. Fe and Cu heavy metal isotope geochemistry) are finding novel applications in the diagnosis of certain pathologies.