Category: Article

A newly released study led by researchers from Emory University‘s Rollins School of Public Health was one of the first to find an emerging class of “forever chemicals” in the homes, drinking water and bodies of United States residents. Key takeaways More than 300 samples from the homes, drinking water and blood and urine of 81 participants were studied. Elevated levels of ultrashort- and short-chain PFAS were found in most household dust samples,…

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Prenatal exposure to single chemicals belonging to the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) family is associated with biological perturbations in the mother, fetus, and placenta, plus adverse health outcomes. Despite our knowledge that humans are exposed to multiple PFAS, the potential joint effects of PFAS on the metabolome remain largely unknown. Here, we leveraged high-resolution metabolomics to identify metabolites and metabolic pathways perturbed by exposure to a PFAS mixture during…

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Water insecurity can have important implications for health and health equity. Achieving universal water security requires strategies to advance access to safe, reliable, affordable drinking water and equitable protection from water-related threats. Read more about JPB Fellow Lara Cushing.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) make up a large group of fluorinated organic compounds extensively used in consumer products and industrial applications. Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the two perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) with 8 carbons in their structure, have been phased out on a global scale because of their high environmental persistence and toxicity. As a result, shorter-chain PFAAs with less than 8 carbons in their structure are…

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Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers’ and communities’ agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community-based participatory research have different scholarly origins and norms but are united in centering communities’ understandings on their terms. Combining the strengths of both, we provide…

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Green vegetation may protect against heat-related death by improving thermal comfort. Few studies have investigated associations of green vegetation with heat-related mortality in Latin America or whether associations are modified by the spatial configuration of green vegetation. We used data from 323 Latin American cities and meta-regression models to estimate associations between city-level greenness, quantified using population-weighted normalized difference vegetation index values and modeled as three-level categorical terms, and excess deaths from heat…

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Amendment 23 (A23) to the Northeast Multispecies Fisheries Management Plan will remake monitoring systems for the Northeast US commercial groundfish fishery. In addition to substantially increasing monitoring coverage, A23 will provide fishers with the option to utilize electronic monitoring (EM) technologies in place of human at-sea observers. Based on twenty-sixinterviews with representatives of the fishing industry, nongovernmental organizations, regulatory agencies, EM service providers, and other stakeholder groups, this paper examines…

Continue reading “Surveillance Systems for Sustainable Fisheries: Perceptions on the Adoption of Electronic Monitoring in the Northeast US Multispecies Fishery”

Understanding how environmental and social stressors cluster is critical to explaining and addressing health disparities. It remains unclear how these stressors cluster at fine spatial resolution in low to medium-income, urban households. We explored patterns of environmental and social exposures at the household-level and potential predictors of these joint exposures in two environmental justice communities in the Greater Boston area. Find here the full article.

Buried beneath homes and businesses, pipelines convey an invisible threat: flammable natural gas. Methane gas leaks in distribution pipelines contribute to climate change, damage urban tree canopies, endanger public safety, and burden ratepayers financially. Despite this, residents often lack the ability to interpret the signs of an outdoor urban gas leak and understand its relationship to larger-scale infrastructural decisions. In order to counter information asymmetries between urban residents and utility…

Continue reading ““Become a Gas Leak Detective!” Evaluating a multigenerational citizen science program for connecting distribution pipelines to energy justice”

New research finds evidence that exposure to PFAS and phenols increases odds of certain ‘hormonally driven’ cancers for women Women exposed to several widely used chemicals appear to face increased odds for ovarian and other types of cancers, including a doubling of odds for melanoma, according to new research funded by the US government. Using data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a team of academic…

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