BACKGROUND Asthma prevalence is lower in less developed countries and among some recent immigrant populations in the US, but the reasons for this are not clear. One possibility is that early childhood infections are protective against asthma. METHODS We surveyed Asian immigrant children (n = 204; age 4-18) to assess the relationship between asthma and native or foreign place of birth. We incl...

Vaccine efficacy (VE) is commonly estimated through proportional hazards modelling of the time to first infection or disease, even when the event of interest can recur. These methods can result in biased estimates when VE is heterogeneous across levels of exposure and susceptibility in subjects. These two factors are important sources of unmeasured heterogeneity, since they vary within and acro...

edi tor 's note : NEHA strives to provide up-to-date and relevant in­ formation on environmental health and to build partnerships in the profes­ sion. In pursuit of these goals, we feature a column from the Environmental Health Services Branch (EHSB) of the Centers for Disease Control and Pre­ vention (CDC) in every issue of the Journal. In this column, EHSB and guest authors from across CDC wi...

BACKGROUND Environmental health research employs a variety of metrics to measure heat exposure, both to directly study the health effects of outdoor temperature and to control for temperature in studies of other environmental exposures, including air pollution. To measure heat exposure, environmental health studies often use heat index, which incorporates both air temperature and moisture. Howe...

Many government, academic and research institutions collect environmental data that are relevant to understanding the relationship between environmental exposures and human health. Integrating these data with health outcome data presents new challenges that are important to consider to improve our effective use of environmental health information. Our objective was to identify the common themes...

Cameron Park, Texas, is a colonia (an isolated, unincorporated rural settlement without municipal improvements) on the Texas-Mexico border in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Cameron County near Brownsville, Texas. Cameron Park has a population of 5,961 residents, 99.3% of whom are Hispanic. The annual median income is 16,934 US dollars, about one-half of the state median. Fifty-eight percent of...

We studied the arboreal composition of the tropical mountain rainforest's upper canopy in the San Martín Pajapán volcano, Tatahuicapan, Veracruz, México (18 degrees 26' N; 94 degrees 17' W). Two forest stands were studied, one in an exposed position and one protected. The Shannon index of diversity and the Jaccard index of affinity were calculated to calculate affinities between plots and betwe...

Pediatricians can reduce exposures to environmental hazards but most have little training in environmental health. To assess whether Wisconsin pediatricians perceive a relative lack of self-efficacy for common environmental exposures and diseases of environmental origin, we assessed their attitudes and beliefs about the role of the environment in children's health. A 4-page survey was sent to t...

Epidemiology is struggling increasingly with problems with correlated exposures and small relative risks. As a consequence, some scholars have strongly emphasized molecular epidemiology, whereas others have argued for the importance of the population context and the reintegration of epidemiology into public health. Environmental epidemiology has several unique features that make these debates e...

edi tor 's Note : NEHA strives to provide up-to-date and relevant in­ formation on environmental health and to build partnerships in the profes­ sion. In pursuit of these goals, we feature a column from the Environmental Health Services Branch (EHSB) of the Centers for Disease Control and Pre­ vention (CDC) in every issue of the Journal. In this column, EHSB and guest authors from across CDC wi...