An environmental vulnerability index framework supporting targeted public health interventions at the census tracts level.

Background: Analyzing and visualizing disparities in environmental risks can help assess place-based vulnerabilities and provide civic leaders and community members with essential data for promoting health equity and informing public health strategies.

Objective: We investigated the adaptation of a previously developed environmental vulnerability index to evaluate the cumulative impact of diverse stressors in Louisville Metro-Jefferson County, KY, with the goal of supporting multi-faceted targeted public health interventions at the census tract level.

Methods: We assessed countywide vulnerability variability using the Toxicological Prioritization Index interface across five domains with 32 publicly available data indicators, and modeled the effects of theoretical public health interventions.

Towards the outbreak tail, what is the public opinion about wastewater surveillance in the United States?

National opinions on a wide variety of public health topics can change over time and have highly contextual nuances. This study is a follow-up to prior inquiries into the knowledge of wastewater-based epidemiology, privacy concerns surrounding sample collection, and the use of data acquired, along with privacy awareness from an online survey conducted in the metropolitan United States during the winter of 2023. Mentions of wastewater-surveillance-related terms in the media remained common.

Wastewater-Informed Digital Advertising as a COVID-19 Geotargeted Neighborhood Intervention: Jefferson County, Kentucky, 2021-2022.

We sought to deliver a geotargeted digital health advertising intervention. We assessed risk of community infection through an integrated public health and wastewater rubric and delivered advertisements between November 2021 and April 2022 in Louisville, Kentucky. The average daily click-through rates for the campaigns were 0.

Generative AI as a Tool for Environmental Health Research Translation.

One valuable application for generative artificial intelligence (AI) is summarizing research studies for non-academic readers. We submitted five articles to Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) for summarization, and asked the article's author to rate the summaries. Higher ratings were assigned to more insight-oriented activities, such as the production of eighth-grade reading level summaries, and summaries highlighting the most important findings and real-world applications.

Generative AI as a Tool for Environmental Health Research Translation.

Generative artificial intelligence, popularized by services like ChatGPT, has been the source of much recent popular attention for publishing health research. Another valuable application is in translating published research studies to readers in non-academic settings. These might include environmental justice communities, mainstream media outlets, and community science groups.

Nationwide public perceptions regarding the acceptance of using wastewater for community health monitoring in the United States.

To assess the levels of infection across communities during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, researchers have measured severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in feces dissolved in sewer water. This activity is colloquially known as sewer monitoring and is referred to as wastewater-based epidemiology in academic settings. Although global ethical principles have been described, sewer monitoring is unregulated for health privacy protection when used for public health surveillance in the United States.

Public Awareness of and Support for the Use of Wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 Monitoring: A Community Survey in Louisville, Kentucky.

The majority of sewer systems in the United States and other countries are operated by public utilities. In the absence of any regulation, the public perception of wastewater monitoring for population health biomarkers is an important consideration for a public utility commission when allocating resources for this purpose. We conducted a survey in August 2021 as part of an ongoing COVID-19 community prevalence study in Louisville/Jefferson County, KY, US.