Bertell, Rosalie, 1929-2012 : Dr. Bertell was a scientist and epidemiologist. Born at Buffalo, New York, in 1929, she received a doctorate in mathematics, with a specialty in biometrics, from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. She was a member of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. From June 1998 to June 2002, Dr. Bertell was President of the Association of Contemplative Sisters, an American and Canadian organization of women who practice and encourage others to practice contemplative prayer.
Beginning in 1966, she studied cancer and birth defects and was a research consultant in biometry with specialty in public health aspects of exposure to ionizing radiation. She was the Senior Cancer Research Scientist, Tri-State Leukemia Survey at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo, N.Y., 1970 to 1978, and was instrumental in founding the Ministry of Concern for Public Health in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1978. Coming to Canada in 1980, she became an Energy and Public Health Specialist with the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice, Toronto, 1980 to 1984. She was a founding member of the non-profit International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH) and served as its Director of Research and Director of the Board, from 1984 to 1987 and as president from 1987 to 1994.
Among her other activities, Dr. Bertell served four years as co-chair for Canada on the Ecosystem Health Workgroup of the Scientific Advisory Board to the U.S.-Canada International Joint Commission (IJC) on the Great Lakes, 1991-1995, and to the IJC Nuclear Task Force, 1995. She also served as Advisor to the Great Lakes Health Effects program of Health Canada and to the Environmental Assessment Board of Ontario. Dr. Bertell directed the International Medical Commission which investigated the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster in India, and the International Medical Commission Chernobyl which presented testimony before a Tribunal in Vienna, April 1996. She was a consultant with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and a member of the board, as energy and public health expert, of Global Education Associates, New York.
Author of Handbook for Estimating the Health Effects of Exposure to Ionizing Radiation (1984, 1986) and the popular non-fiction No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth (1985), together with more than one hundred articles, book chapters and poems, Dr. Bertell has reached medical, scientific and popular audiences on a global basis. She also published Planet Earth: the Latest Weapon of War, 2001. She has been the editor-in-chief of the periodical, International Perspectives in Public Health.
She advocated stricter safeguards and better monitoring of the health of nuclear workers and the general public, a phase-out of nuclear technology for weapons or power generation, waste isolation rather than disposal, standardized international monitoring of environmental and human health, and protection of the biosphere from genotoxic damage. Dr. Bertell worked with indigenous and third world people as they struggled to preserve health and life in the face of industrial, technological and military pollution.
Dr. Bertell received numerous awards and honorary doctorates which include: the Alternative Nobel Prize: Right Livelihood Award, 1986; the World Federalist Peace Award, 1988; the Ontario Premier's Council on Health: Health Innovator Award, 1991; the Marguerite D'Youville Humanitarian Award, Lexington, Mass., 1992; the United Nations Environment Programme Global 500 Laureate, 1993; and the MacBride International Peace Prize, 2001.
International Institute of Concern for Public Health : The International Institute of Concern for Public Health was founded in 1984 at Toronto, Ontario, by Dr. Rosalie Bertell and others as a non-profit Canadian corporation.
It provides professional and informational services related to the impact of environmental hazards on public health; scientific and technical assistance to government agencies, citizen organizations and labour unions relative to environmental hazards; lectures or scientific publications to those groups requesting them; and conducts research into environmental hazards. The institute operates in Canada and in other countries around the world where environmental hazards threaten public health.
