Studies of the effects of environmental exposures on domestic and wild animals can corroborate or inform epidemiologic studies in humans. Animals may be sensitive indicators of environmental hazards and provide an early warning system for public health intervention, as exemplified by the iconic canary in the coal mine. This article illustrates the application of animal sentinel research to eluc...

Measurement methods for chemicals in biological and personal environmental samples have expanded rapidly and become a cornerstone of health studies and public health surveillance. These measurements raise questions about whether and how to report individual results to study participants, particularly when health effects and exposure reduction strategies are uncertain. In an era of greater publi...

BACKGROUND Asthma prevalence is increasing worldwide in most populations, likely due to a combination of heritable factors and environmental changes. Curiously, however, some European farming populations are protected from asthma, which has been attributed to their traditional lifestyles and farming practices. OBJECTIVE We conducted population-based studies of asthma and atopy in the Hutterit...

Two essential elements contribute to the risk of all diseases, especially cancer: genetic variation and environmental exposures. The completion of a solid draft of the human genome will allow researchers to characterize genotypes to ever-finer degrees of detail, and to continue to identify genetic traits associated with disease in individuals and families. However, much of the genetic variation...

five Vanguard locations will join them, followed by 29 additional locations in 2010 and more in the following 2 years. The NCS, a national longitudinal cohort study of 100,000 children to be followed from early pregnancy to adulthood, will examine how environmental exposures, interacting with genetic factors and medical access, affect children's health and development. Beginning enrollment caps...

The article by Pan et al. in the May issue shows that the prevalence of myopia is very low in adults from two ethnic groups—Han Chinese and Yi (one of China’s national minority groups) living in the same rural area in Yunnan Province. The very low prevalence of myopia in both groups shows that myopia is not inevitable in East Asian populations, but requires exposure to environmental risk factor...

“If a new cancer therapy is tested only on young white men, can we generalize that an elderly Hispanic woman will have the same response to the treatment?” So asks Gwendolyn P. Quinn, PhD, associate professor of oncologic sciences at the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine. With colleagues at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Quinn has developed a Spanish-language DVD and booklet based o...

Accounting for gene-environment (G×E) interactions in complex trait association studies can facilitate our understanding of genetic heterogeneity under different environmental exposures, improve the ability to discover susceptible genes that exhibit little marginal effect, provide insight into the biological mechanisms of complex diseases, help to identify high-risk subgroups in the population,...

On 12-13 June 2001, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) convened a seven-member panel in Atlanta, Georgia, to review and discuss the current state of the science related to hair analysis, specifically its use in assessing environmental exposures in support of the agency's public health assessment activities. ATSDR invited scientific experts in the fields of hair analysi...

When I was asked to write an article about work–life balance, I told my wife and she innocently asked me, " In order to write about work–life balance, don't you need to have a work–life balance first? " After all of these years of practice, didn't I have that balance worked out? Was my perception totally inaccurate? I know that struggling to balance my work and life outside of work has been som...