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Biomarkers - Key to Exposure Reconstruction
Citation:
Tan, C., M. Phillips, J. Sobus, D. Chang, AND Rocky Goldsmith. Biomarkers - Key to Exposure Reconstruction. Chapter 14, Yearbook of Science & Technology 2014. McGraw-Hill Companies, New York, NY, , 38-41, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL′s) 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 goal of environmental health science is to understand the interplay between environment and humans in order to evaluate the effects of human activities on the environment, as well as to evaluate the effects of various aspects of the environment on human health. When investigating the effects that exposures to environmental chemicals have on human health, the major challenge lies in establishing the causal relationship between the magnitude of exposure to environmental chemicals and the incidence of adverse outcomes at various biological endpoints (e.g., cancer, irritation). This causal relationship can only be established when each element on the source-exposure-dose-effect continuum are linked (Fig 1). For an adverse health outcome to occur from exposure to a chemical, the chemical has to be released from a source, transported through environmental media, reach a human receptor, enter the body, and accumulate within the target tissue to a sufficient degree to cause biological changes that ultimately overwhelm the adaptive mechanisms and result in adverse health outcomes.