Environmental & Public Health

You work hard every day on issues affecting the health of residents in your state. You release reports about the dangers of fracking and other critical environmental issues. You try to link economic development with natural resource stewardship. You tweet and blog and host webinars to get the issues out to the public. But if you live in a state like West Virginia, you’re literally swimming upstream struggling for recognition of the big issues in the face of policymakers tied to a carbon-based future.

From the beginning, lease agreements have barred residents from digging in their yards or altering the landscaping because of the arsenic, pesticides, lead, PCBs and other chemicals on a long list of known toxic materials left over in the dirt from the Navy's trash pit under portions of the housing area. But some residents said that prohibition wasn't made clear to them, and public health experts say it's ridiculous to expect children not to play in the dirt.

Santoyo: What is the most important message you try to relay to your students?

Add liver cancer—a childhood cancer on the rise in the US—to the growing list of potential health effects associated with bisphenol A (BPA) exposure that are under scrutiny by researchers. A recent study by scientists at the University of Michigan, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first ever to report a dose-dependent, statistically significant relationship between perinatal (before and just after birth) exposures to environmentally relevant levels of BPA and development of cancerous liver tumors later in life.

When chemicals such as BPA mimic hormones, it leads to what’s called endocrine disruption. “The effect is not necessarily toxic in the traditional sense,” says Sarah Vogel, director of the health program at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of “Is it Safe? BPA and the Struggle to Define the Safety of Chemicals,” but it is a disruption.

Even as the researchers have been trying to unravel the tangled effects of pesticides and other chemicals on children’s development, they’ve been devising practical ways to help the study’s participants reduce their risk of exposure—a rare example of community engagement by academic scientists. In a place that’s often sharply polarized between those who own the fields and those who work in them, CHAMACOS researchers have insisted on involving all sides.

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.

"The changes in hydraulics and internal pressures associated with reversing flow in a pipeline, particularly one that crosses multiple hills and valleys, can increase the risk of a spill," said Director of Conservation Carol Foss of the Audubon Society of New Hampshire explained in a recent press conference. "While any discharge of crude oil into the North Country environment would be a disaster, impacts of a dilbit spill would be particularly severe and lasting.

Director and Lead Author Angel Hsu (2012) launched the 2014 Environmental Performance Index at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. The press briefing addresses the best and worst performers on Yale and Columbia Universities’ 2014 Environmental Performance Index, a global ranking of national-level environmental performance, introduce a new Global Scorecard that gives insight into global environmental performance over the past decade.