Environmental & Public Health

The sun is strong, the sky Hollywood-set blue, but the wind is brutal. This is confounding the work of Wade Elmer, chief scientist for the Department of Plant Pathology and Ecology at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. At the CAES farm in Hamden, he and a small contingent of grad students, lab assistants, and other researchers are busy transplanting eggplant seedlings and chasing empty seed containers across the blustery, one-tenth of an acre that Elmer likes to call the “death bed.”

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.

YOU HAVE NO real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier–it may, in fact, be the norm—but because no one has enough data to say for sure. ...

2016 Fellow Kimberley Rain Miner is developing a framework to assess the threat of pesticides — including DDT — that for years have been trapped in glacial ice and now are entering watersheds as the glaciers melt. She seeks to quantify effects of pollutants downstream for her doctorate at the University of Maine.

Researchers have discovered a possible link between the rise in both dust storms and valley fever cases in the southwestern United States over the previous two decades. A study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that dust storms have dramatically risen by 240 percent from the 1990s to the 2000s. In the Southwest, the average number of windblown dust storms increased from 20 per year in the 1990s to 48 per year in the 2000s, according to the NOAA-led study.

Among her many accomplishments bridging her love of science and public service, Fellow Karen Levy's most recent is her selection as a fellow of the AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute (LLI) for Public Engagement with Science. “The best way to maintain public support for science is for people to understand it,” Levy says, “to understand the underlying scientific process, to learn about exciting discoveries, and to understand how it affects their own lives.”

A notification system that alerts authorities when fishing vessels that are believed to be operating illegally arrive in port is being developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Australia’s national science agency explained that the web-based reporting tool identifies and ranks vessels across the globe based on a list of behaviors associated with illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. It uses data collected by satellites to monitor and report vessels behaving suspiciously.

Dr. Asa Bradman is an environmental health scientist and expert in exposure assessment and epidemiology focusing on occupational and environmental exposures to pregnant women and children. He co-founded the Center for Environmental Research and Children's Health (CERCH) in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and directs an initiative to improve environmental quality in California child care facilities.