Environmental & Public Health

Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant with the Morgantown firm Downstream Strategies, has been wondering for several days about whether the health studies and water-sampling efforts included the other constituents of Crude MCHM. Posting his thoughts on Twitter, Hansen said the distinction between the two substances is important. "Are water tests in area being done for all constituents of Crude MCHM or just for 4-MCHM," Hansen posted. Read more

From 1996 Switzer Fellow Evan Hansen, whose West Virginia-based firm Downstream Strategies offers environmental consulting services with a core belief in the importance of protecting the environment and linking economic development with natural resource stewardship:

From 2000 Switzer Fellow Jen Osha, who is coordinating an effort to bring bottled water to West Virginia residents whose water supply was contaminated by the chemical leak at Freedom Industries last week:

A team of scientists came to Richmond in 2006 to conduct a new kind of study, one that would try to answer residents' questions of which outdoor pollutants were coming indoors. At 40 homes in Richmond and 10 in nearby Bolinas, which has no heavy industry, equipment monitored pollution levels outdoors and indoors. The results were striking. The outdoor levels around Richmond homes were almost double the levels around Bolinas homes, and the chemicals moved indoors. Vanadium and nickel in outdoors air were among the highest in the state.

Hello all: I just received an important notice from the Global Footprint Network (based in Geneva). Today, 20 August 2013, is “Earth Overshoot Day.” It’s the approximate date that humanity’s annual demand on nature exceeds what Earth can renew in a year.

Most likely the items in your home or office came from overseas. Today's report focuses on the question how those products got to you, and what is the impact on the environment and workers?

Abstract: Current literature is insufficient to make causal inferences or establish dose-response relationships for traffic-related ultrafine particles (UFPs) and cardiovascular (CV) health. The Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) is a cross-sectional study of the relationship between UFP and biomarkers of CV risk. CAFEH uses a community-based participatory research framework that partners university researchers with community groups and residents. Our central hypothesis is that chronic exposure to UFP is associated with changes in biomarkers.

Exposure to high levels of traffic-generated particles may pose risks to human health; however, limited measurement has been conducted at homes near highways. The purpose of this study was to characterize differences between indoor and outdoor particle number concentration (PNC) in homes near to and distant from a highway and to identify factors that may affect infiltration. Read more (abstract only, full article requires subscription)