School of Public Health

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Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.

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Author: search.filters.author.Payne-Sturges, Devon C.Subject: search.filters.subject.Environmental justice

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    Both parents matter: a national-scale analysis of parental race/ethnicity, disparities in prenatal PM2.5 exposures and related impacts on birth outcomes
    (Springer Nature, 2022-05-06) Payne-Sturges, Devon C.; Puett, Robin; Cory-Slechta, Deborah A.
    Most U.S. studies that report racial/ethnic disparities in increased risk of low birth weight associated with air pollution exposures have been conducted in California or northeastern states and/or urban areas, limiting generalizability of study results. Few of these studies have examined maternal racial/ethnic groups other than Non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic White and Hispanic, nor have they included paternal race. We aimed to examine the independent effects of PM2.5 on birth weight among a nationally representative sample of U.S. singleton infants and how both maternal and paternal race/ethnicity modify relationships between prenatal PM2.5 exposures and birth outcomes. We used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS–B), a longitudinal nationally representative cohort of 10,700 U.S. children born in 2001, which we linked to U.S.EPA’s Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ)-derived predicted daily PM2.5 concentrations at the centroid of each Census Bureau Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) for maternal residences. We examined relationships between term birthweight (TBW), term low birthweight rate (TLBW) and gestational PM2.5 pollutant using multivariate regression models. Effect modification of air pollution exposures on birth outcomes by maternal and paternal race was evaluated using stratified models. All analyses were conducted with sample weights to provide national-scale estimates. The majority of mothers were White (61%). Fourteen percent of mothers identified as Black, 21% as Hispanic, 3% Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and 1% American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN). Fathers were also racially/ethnically diverse with 55% identified as White Non-Hispanic, 10% as Black Non-Hispanic, 19% as Hispanic, 3% as AAPI and 1% as AIAN. Results from the chi-square and ANOVA tests of significance for racial/ethnic differences indicate disparities in prenatal exposures and birth outcomes by both maternal and paternal race/ethnicity. Prenatal PM2.5 was associated with reduced birthweights during second and third trimester and over the entire gestational period in adjusted regression models, although results did not reach statistical significance. In models stratified by maternal race and paternal race, one unit increase in PM2.5 was statistically significantly associated with lower birthweights among AAPI mothers, -5.6 g (95% CI:-10.3, -1.0 g) and AAPI fathers, -7.6 g (95% CI: -13.1, -2.1 g) during 3rd trimester and among births where father’s race was not reported, -14.2 g (95% CI: -24.0, -4.4 g). These data suggest that paternal characteristics should be used, in addition to maternal characteristics, to describe the risks of adverse birth outcomes. Additionally, our study suggests that serious consideration should be given to investigating environmental and social mechanisms, such as air pollution exposures, as potential contributors to disparities in birth outcomes among AAPI populations.
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    Mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental justice in United States federal policy, 1980–2016
    (Springer Nature, 2021-09-17) Hunt Sprinkle, Robert; Payne-Sturges, Devon C.
    Toxic chemicals — “toxicants” — have been studied and regulated as single entities, and, carcinogens aside, almost all toxicants, single or mixed and however altered, have been thought harmless in very low doses or very weak concentrations. Yet much work in recent decades has shown that toxicants can injure wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans following exposures previously expected to be harmless. Additional work has shown that toxicants can act not only individually and cumulatively but also collectively and even synergistically and that they affect disadvantaged communities inordinately — and therefore, as argued by reformers, unjustly. As late as December 2016, the last full month before the inauguration of a president promising to rescind major environmental regulations, the United States federal environmental-health establishment, as led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), had not developed coherent strategies to mitigate such risks, to alert the public to their plausibility, or to advise leadership in government and industry about their implications. To understand why, we examined archival materials, reviewed online databases, read internal industry communications, and interviewed experts. We confirmed that external constraints, statutory and judicial, had been in place prior to EPA’s earliest interest in mixture toxicity, but we found no overt effort, certainly no successful effort, to loosen those constraints. We also found internal constraints: concerns that fully committing to the study of complex mixtures involving numerous toxicants would lead to methodological drift within the toxicological community and that trying to act on insights from such study could lead only to regulatory futility. Interaction of these constraints, external and internal, shielded the EPA by circumscribing its responsibilities and by impeding movement toward paradigmatic adjustment, but it also perpetuated scientifically dubious policies, such as those limiting the evaluation of commercial chemical formulations, including pesticide formulations, to only those ingredients said by their manufacturers to be active. In this context, regulators’ disregard of synergism contrasted irreconcilably with biocide manufacturers’ understanding that synergism enhanced lethality and patentability. In the end, an effective national response to mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental injustice did not emerge. In parallel, though, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which was less constrained, pursued with scientific investigation what the EPA had not pursued with regulatory action.