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:
- Young RL, Weinberg J, Vieira VM, Aschengrau A, Webster TF. A multilevel non-hierarchical study of birth weight and socioeconomic status. International Journal of Health Geographics 2010, 9:36 [Online 9 July 2010]. The full text is freely available doi:10.1186/1476-072X-9-36.
- 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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