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INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO HUMAN EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE COMMUNITIES
Citation:
Anderson, Y. B., D A. Vallero, AND K W. Leovic. INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO HUMAN EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE COMMUNITIES. Presented at Environmental Science & Technology Conference, Winston-Salem, NC, September 8-10, 2002.
Impact/Purpose:
Project objectives are to: 1) assess environmental exposures in communities of color and/or economically/educationally disadvantaged communities, 2) develop the research infrastructure of the NCCU Environmental Science Program, and 3) develop improved tools for conducting community-based exposure research in environmental justice communities.
Description:
North Carolina Central University (NCCU) recently began an innovative human exposure research program in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Exposure Research Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, NC. In this project, researchers will examine potential routes of environmental exposure by measuring contaminants in selected communities. The project will also serve to develop the research infrastructure of the NCCU Environmental Science Program and outreach tools for environmental justice communities.
The project will begin by assessing the environmental exposures in one community of color and/or economically disadvantaged that may be impacted by environmental hazards. A long-range goal of the project is to develop and validate community-level exposure scenarios that can be adapted to other similar communities of color and/or economically disadvantaged communities. The community to be studied will be an environmental justice community, have a sufficient data set available to establish a baseline of exposure scenarios, have existing community groups or structures to help to provide input and feedback to the researchers, and have sufficient population for recruitment of study participants. In addition, it would be desirable for the community to be representative of larger North Carolina socioeconomic and racial demographics, provide for state and local partnerships, be a continuous and ongoing exposure scenario (rather than a single or episodic event), maximize NCCU faculty and student involvement, and have reasonable cost-effective sampling and analytical approaches.
The status of the study design and the possible "lessons learned" and opportunities for technology transfer to other environmental justice communities will be discussed.
This work has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under cooperative agreement # R-82946901-0. It has been subjected to Agency review and approved for publication.