Digging at the Intersection of Environment and Health
Duke Researchers Cross Disciplines to Search for Reasons We Get Sick and for Ways of Preventing It
by Karl Leif Bates
In the middle of a Venn diagram where human health concerns like cancer, diabetes and asthma meet real-world environmental conditions like water pollution, lead paint and social stress, a growing collaboration of Duke researchers have begun digging.
They want to know specifically where and how we get sick in the hope of being better able to prevent us from getting sick in the first place.
Duke researchers from the Nicholas School, the Medical School, the Center for Child and Family Policy and other seemingly far-flung departments are combining the latest tools of environmental science like geographic information systems (GIS), with social and health statistics, to create rich new understanding.
“Duke is superbly set up to take advantage of this,” says Nicholas School Professor Richard Di Giulio, looking outside his office window where Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine, and Applied Sciences (CIEMAS) looms. “We need to take a step back and look at how the larger environment affects human health,” says Di Giulio, who directs Duke’s Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program and Superfund Basic Research Center.
At the core of much of this activity is the Nicholas School-based Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI), a family of ambitious research projects looking at how, why and where children’s health varies in relation to such things as lead exposure, indoor air quality and neonatal care and conditions.
This work increasingly focuses on the neighborhood environment—sources of stress or unhappiness, for example, that are difficult to measure but that have real health consequences. Numerous studies are finding distinct correlations between negative experiences, like being on the receiving end of discrimination, and poorer health indicators.
“Health is not just about pathogens,” says Duke Sociology Chairman Phillip Morgan, who has worked with CEHI. “There’s also a sense of well-being: stressors matter.”
In addition to whatever it’s doing to local air and water quality, “just the stress of living near a Superfund site can have an effect on your health,” adds Di Giulio. “It’s hard for us to measure, but you know it’s there.”
Living in an unsafe community is itself a kind of toxin, argues Duke psychologist Kenneth Dodge, who directs the Center for Child and Family Policy. Verbal and physical abuse are what he calls “environmental toxins,” and a growing body of epidemiology backs him up. “These are psycho-social toxins.”
If you add to this map of psycho-social stressors the sorts of factors that poor housing contains—lead pipes, lead paint, poor air quality—there’s a remarkable overlap, Dodge says. “It turns out those things are correlated, and these are often the very same families.”
photo captions: Richard Di Giulio; Marie Lynn Miranda with EPA Administrator Stephen L.Johnson; David Hinton; Yates Cooley T'06 gathers data in northeast Durham.