The aims of this study were to evaluate the exposure to permethrin and cypermethrin of young children aged between 2 and 5 years in Nakhon Pathom and Sing Buri provinces, Thailand. A questionnaire that included general demographic information, household characteristics, insecticide usage and exposure-related behavior in children was used to interview parents or family caregivers. Permethrin and cypermethrin concentrations on floor surfaces and children's hands, as well as their urinary metabolites, were analyzed by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
November 2022
Approximately 2000 official and potential Superfund sites are located within 25 miles of the East or Gulf coasts, many of which will be at risk of flooding as sea levels rise. More than 60 million people across the United States live within 3 miles of a Superfund site. Disentangling multifaceted environmental health problems compounded by climate change requires a multidisciplinary systems approach to inform better strategies to prevent or reduce exposures and protect human health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Since 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in >554M cases and >6.3M deaths worldwide. The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, has resulted in a broad range of clinical symptoms differing in severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental health sciences (EHS) span many diverse disciplines. Within the EHS community, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Superfund Research Program (SRP) funds multidisciplinary research aimed to address pressing and complex issues on how people are exposed to hazardous substances and their related health consequences with the goal of identifying strategies to reduce exposures and protect human health. While disentangling the interrelationships that contribute to environmental exposures and their effects on human health over the course of life remains difficult, advances in data science and data sharing offer a path forward to explore data across disciplines to reveal new insights.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding the health effects of exposures when there is a lag between exposure and the onset of disease is an important and challenging topic in environmental health research. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Basic Research and Training Program (SRP) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant program that uses a multidisciplinary approach to support biomedical and environmental science and engineering research. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of the program, SRP grantees are well-positioned to study exposure and latent disease risk across humans, animal models, and various life stages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
August 2021
Waste electronic and electrical equipment (e-waste) consists of used and discarded electrical and electronic items ranging from refrigerators to cell phones and printed circuit boards. It is frequently moved from developed countries to developing countries where it is dismantled for valuable metals in informal settings, resulting in significant human exposure to toxic substances. E-waste is a major concern in Africa, with large sites in Ghana and Nigeria where imported e-waste is dismantled under unsafe conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Superfund Research Program (SRP) funds diverse transdisciplinary research to understand how hazardous substances contribute to disease. SRP research focuses on how to prevent these exposures by promoting problem-based, solution-oriented research. SRP's mandate areas encompasses broad biomedical and environmental science and engineering research efforts and, when combined with research translation, community engagement, training, and data science, offers broad expertise and unique perspectives directed at a specific big picture question.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Hazardous Substances Basic Research and Training Program [Superfund Research Program (SRP)] funds transdisciplinary research projects spanning the biomedical and environmental sciences to address issues related to potentially hazardous substances. We used a case study approach to identify how SRP-funded basic biomedical research has had an impact on society. We examined how transdisciplinary research projects from the SRP have advanced knowledge and led to additional clinical, public health, policy, and economic benefits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Basic Research and Training Program (SRP) funds a wide range of projects that span biomedical, environmental sciences, and engineering research and generate a wealth of data resulting from hypothesis-driven research projects. Combining or integrating these diverse data offers an opportunity to uncover new scientific connections that can be used to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between exposures and health. Integrating and reusing data generated from individual research projects within the program requires harmonization of data workflows, ensuring consistent and robust practices in data stewardship, and embracing data sharing from the onset of data collection and analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
August 2019
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Superfund Research Program (SRP) funds university-based, solution-oriented research to understand how hazardous substances contribute to disease and how to prevent exposures to these hazardous substances. A unique aspect of the SRP is that, beyond the biomedical, environmental sciences, and engineering research projects, SRP-funded centers are required to include community engagement to build partnerships with affected communities and research translation to communicate and facilitate the use of research findings. The SRP views both as effective ways to inform and advance science for protection of public health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Central and Eastern Europe region is faced with longstanding environmental health problems as well as emerging health threats from pollution caused by the region's recent period of rapid industrialization. As researchers in the region continue to work to address these problems, they could find unique approaches by increasing collaborations between biomedical and non-biomedical scientists and by more closely following the Superfund Research Program model of pursuing basic research, then connecting with stakeholders in the region to share and apply new knowledge. To build upon and leverage research in the region, researchers and stakeholders should work to formalize the bi-annual meeting of the Central and Eastern European Conference on Health and the Environment into a more cohesive organization and make efforts to connect to broader global networks that aim to spread research results and applications around the world.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren are particularly vulnerable to environmental hazards because they receive higher doses of pollutants in any given environment and often do not have equitable access to social protection mechanisms such as environmental and health care services. The World Health Organization established a global network of collaborating centres that address children's environmental health (CEH). The network developed a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and is broadening its reach by conducting regional workshops for CEH.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFindings: The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health found that pollution - air, water, soil, and chemical pollution - was responsible in 2016 for 940,000 deaths in children worldwide, two-thirds of them in children under the age of 5. Pollution is inequitably distributed, and the overwhelming majority of pollution-related deaths in children occurred in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Most were due to respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases caused by polluted air and water.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeaths from complex, noncommunicable diseases such as cancer are predicted to continue to increase worldwide, with low- and middle-income countries bearing the brunt of the burden. This problem requires a concentrated global effort to avoid devastating losses of life as well as economic losses. Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is a readily studied model of complex, noncommunicable disease, but it receives little attention outside of the scientific community in Southeast Asia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPollution is a major, overlooked, global health threat that was responsible in 2015 for an estimated 9 million deaths and great economic losses. To end neglect of pollution and advance prevention of pollution-related disease, we formed the Commission on Pollution and Health. Despite recent gains in understanding of pollution and its health effects, this Commission noted that large gaps in knowledge remain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Health Perspect
June 2018
Background: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Basic Research and Training Program (SRP) funds a wide range of transdisciplinary research projects spanning the biomedical and environmental sciences and engineering, supporting and promoting the application of that research to solving real-world problems.
Objectives: We used a case study approach to identify the economic and societal benefits of SRP-funded research, focusing on the use of potentially hazardous substance remediation and site monitoring tools. We also identified successes and challenges involved in translating SRP grantees' research findings and advances into application.
Human exposure to environmental contaminants such as persistent chlorinated organics, heavy metals, pesticides, phthalates, flame retardants, electronic waste and airborne pollutants around the world, and especially in Southeast Asian regions, are significant and require urgent attention. Given this widespread contamination and abundance of such toxins as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the ecosystem, it is unlikely that remediation alone will be sufficient to address the health impacts associated with this exposure. Furthermore, we must assume that the impact on health of some of these contaminants results in populations with extraordinary vulnerabilities to disease risks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Research Program (SRP) funds university-based, multidisciplinary research on human health and environmental science and engineering with the central goals to understand how hazardous substances contribute to disease and how to prevent exposures to these environmental chemicals. This multi-disciplinary approach allows early career scientists (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInnovative devices and tools for exposure assessment and remediation play an integral role in preventing exposure to hazardous substances. New solutions for detecting and remediating organic, inorganic, and mixtures of contaminants can improve public health as a means of primary prevention. Using a public health prevention model, detection and remediation technologies contribute to primary prevention as tools to identify areas of high risk (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRev Environ Health
March 2017
While each region of the world faces unique challenges, environmental threats to vulnerable populations throughout Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) present a significant public health challenge. Environmental pollution is widespread, resulting from the consequences of rapid industrialization during the Soviet Union era. To help address these concerns, a meeting, sponsored in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Research Program (SRP), was convened in 1994.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvidence has accumulated that exposure to widespread environmental toxicants, such as heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, and tobacco smoke adversely affect fetal development and organ maturation, even after birth. The developing immune and respiratory systems are more sensitive to environmental toxicants due to their long-term physical development, starting from the early embryonic stage and persisting into early postnatal life, which requires complex signaling pathways that control proliferation and differentiation of highly heterogeneous cell types. In this review, we summarize the effect of early-life exposure to several widespread environmental toxicants on immune and lung development before and after birth, including the effects on immune cell counts, baseline characteristics of cell-mediated and humoral immunity, and alteration of lung structure and function in offspring.
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