Cultivating Health in All Policies Mindsets: An Ongoing Journey to Integrate Health and Housing in Georgia.

This project report explores the use of a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach by the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) to integrate health perspectives into affordable housing policy and practice in Georgia. It focuses on five interconnected projects from over a decade-long collaboration to illustrate how the GHPC team started with a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) to seed cross-sector partnerships and then sustained them through subsequent collaborations. These projects included comprehensive-, intermediate-, and rapid-scale HIAs, as well as direct collaborations on housing development funding applications and a multidisciplinary research study on public housing renovations.

Bad lighting: Effects of youth indoor tanning prohibitions.

Indoor tanning beds (ITBs) emit UV light at high intensity and have been classified as carcinogenic to humans by the World Health Organization since 2009. We are the first to study the role of state laws prohibiting youths from indoor tanning using a difference-in-differences research design. We find that youth ITB prohibitions reduced population search intensity for tanning-related information.

The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision.

We find access to universal free school meals through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) had a meaningful impact on grocery spending for households with children, with monthly food purchases declining by about $11, or 5 percent. For households in zip codes with higher exposure, the decline is as high as $39 per month, or 19 percent. The composition of food purchases also changes after CEP, with low income households experiencing a 3 percent improvement in dietary quality.

Pollution at schools and children's aerobic capacity.

Poor respiratory health is a major cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide, and children are especially vulnerable. Existing research in economics has documented the effect of pollution on severe health outcomes, such as hospitalizations for asthma and infant death. However, evidence on the effect of air pollution on less extreme measures of respiratory health is limited, because these effects are difficult to measure.

On the road to recovery: Gasoline content regulations and child health.

Gasoline content regulations are designed to curb pollution and improve health, but their impact on health has not been quantified. By exploiting both the timing of regulation and spatial variation in children's exposure to highways, I estimate the effect of gasoline content regulation on pollution and child health. The introduction of cleaner-burning gasoline in California in 1996 reduced asthma admissions by 8% in high exposure areas.

FedExosomes: Engineering Therapeutic Biological Nanoparticles that Truly Deliver.

Many aspects of intercellular communication are mediated through "sending" and "receiving" packets of information via the secretion and subsequent receptor-mediated detection of biomolecular species including cytokines, chemokines, and even metabolites. Recent evidence has now established a new modality of intercellular communication through which biomolecular species are exchanged between cells via extracellular lipid vesicles. A particularly important class of extracellular vesicles is exosomes, which is a term generally applied to biological nanovesicles ~30-200 nm in diameter.

Health impact assessment of the Atlanta BeltLine.

Background: Although a health impact assessment (HIA) is a tool that can provide decision makers with recommendations to promote positive health impacts and mitigate adverse health impacts of proposed projects and policies, it is not routinely conducted on most major projects or policies.

Purpose: To make health a decision criterion for the Atlanta BeltLine, a multibillion-dollar transit, trails, parks, and redevelopment project.

Methods: An HIA was conducted in 2005-2007 to anticipate and influence the BeltLine's effect on health determinants.

Transgenerational effects of poor elemental food quality on Daphnia magna.

Environmental effects on parents can strongly affect the phenotype of their offspring, which alters the heritability of traits and the offspring's responses to the environment. We examined whether P limitation of the aquatic invertebrate, Daphnia magna, alters the responses of its offspring to inadequate P nutrition. Mother Daphnia consuming P-poor algal food produced smaller neonates having lower body P content compared to control (P-rich) mothers.