You are here:
Application of Tools and Databases to Community-Level Assessments of Exposure, Health and the Environment with Case Study Examples
Citation:
BARZYK, T. M., B. White, L. Perlmutt, M. MILLARD, M. MARTIN, F. HARRIS, P. NGUYEN, K. MEMMOS, F. JENKINS, D. HAMMOND, A. WALTS, A. GELLER, V. G. ZARTARIAN, AND B. D. SCHULTZ. Application of Tools and Databases to Community-Level Assessments of Exposure, Health and the Environment with Case Study Examples. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-11/120 (NTIS PB2013-102730), 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD′s research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA′s strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
The purpose of this report is to assess the application of tools to community-level assessments of exposure, health and the environment. Various tools and datasets provided different types of information, such as on health effects, chemical types and volumes, facility locations and demographics, and different formats, such as maps, graphs and tables. Each community case study has a documented environmental or public health concern. This report focuses primarily on the identification of potential issues of concern and the collection of information for them (and the tools and datasets available for these tasks); in contrast, it does not focus on risk ranking or prioritization, which falls more into the category of a formal risk assessment.