CIREEHwiki | Main / Community Context Of Environmental Health

The Department of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health has a long-standing interest and commitment to the community context of environmental health. Examples include:

Communities with exposure to hazardous chemicals (see also spatial epidemiology)
International environmental health
Biomonitoring
Environmental health disparities

Several people in my department are involved in these and other related topics. Here's a sample of my interests.

Biomonitoring
One newer interest is biomonitoring, the measurement of chemicals, often in urine or blood, as a marker of exposure. An example is the CDC's extraordinarily valuable National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) which, among other things, measures chemicals in a representative sample of the US population.

Among the questions posed by biomonitoring are:

Should investigators report biomonitoring information to participants? Many people argue that participants have a right to this information. The traditional biomedical medical model argues against it, in part because we often do not know what the results mean in terms of health.
Breastmilk monitoring is a standard method for measuring many persistent organic pollutants (POPs) because it is less physically invasive than sampling blood and breastmilk has a much higher fat content, making the analysis easier (most POPs are fat soluble). But it has been argued, without a lot of evidence either way, that this may scare mothers from breastfeeding (which would be bad).

To get at these and other questions, we participated in two studies:

A Danish-style consensus conference on biomonitoring, involving non-expert Boston-area residents: the 2006 Boston Consensus Conference on Biomonitoring.
Asking participants in a breastmilk biomonitoring study how they felt about participation and reporting of results. The results are presented in our publications listed below.

International Environmental Health

A recent interest is contamination of communities in China resulting from e-waste and manufacture of flame retardants, including PBDEs. Dr. Webster participated in a 2009 conference on fire retardants in Beijing. The conference was discussed in a news article in Science.

Environmental health disparities

Differences in disease by socioeconomic position and race/ethnicity. This work has ties to spatial epidemiology.
Differences in exposure by socioeconomic position, race/ethnicity, gender, age, and geography.

Publications:

Wu N, McClean MD, Brown P, Aschengrau A, Webster TF. Participant Experiences in a Breastmilk Biomonitoring Study: A qualitative assessment. Environmental Health; 2009, 8:4. [Online 18 February 2009]. The full text is freely available doi:10.1186/1476-069X-8-4.
Nelson JW, Scammell MK, Altman RG, Webster TF, Ozonoff DM. A New Spin on Research Translation: The Boston Consensus Conference on Human Biomonitoring. Environ Health Perspect. 2009; 117:495–499. [Online 30 October 2008]. The full text is freely available here.
Webster TF, Hoffman K, Weinberg J, Vieira V, Aschengrau A. Community and Individual-Level Socioeconomic Status and Breast Cancer Risk: Multi-level Modeling on Cape Cod, MA. Environ Health Perspect 2008; 116(8):1125-1129. doi:10.1289/ehp.10818. [Online 25 April 2008]. The full text is freely available here.
A really old paper: Anderson S, Gardner B, Moll B, Tribble G, Webster T, Wilson K, Zyda M (1978). Correlation Between Air Pollution and Socio-economic Factors in Los Angeles County. Atmospheric Environment 12:1531-1535. more.

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