BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health are getting $16.5 million to support three research centers as part of a federal initiative to examine the environmental factors influencing children’s health.

UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health is receiving $16.5 million to support research on environmental health factors and children’s health.

The grants to UC Berkeley are among $54 million recently awarded to 12 university- based centers across the country by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). UC Berkeley is the only institution to have received awards for multiple centers.

The new grants are part of a program that began in 1998 with eight centers funded by the NIEHS and the EPA. The newest funding incorporates the latest biomonitoring tools and advances in epigenetics, or the study of inheritable genetic changes linked to exposure to chemical and environmental agents.

“These awards give testimony to the school’s leadership in the field of environmental epidemiology,” said Stephen Shortell, dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “This research will address the environmental health risks of some of the state’s most vulnerable populations, and the knowledge gained will lead to new polices and practices that will help mitigate these risks.”

Of the 12 new centers, six will each receive an average of $7.5 million over five years. An additional six, charged with studying less-established environmental determinants of children’s health, will each receive an average of $1.5 million over three years.

The three UC Berkeley centers to be funded are:

• The Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health, led by Brenda Eskenazi, professor of maternal and child health and of epidemiology. It will receive $7.5 million. The foundation of this interdisciplinary research program, one of the original eight centers funded in 1998, is a longitudinal study of primarily low-income, Mexican immigrant women and their children living in the agricultural community of California’s Salinas Valley. The researchers are studying the health impact of exposures to such chemicals as agricultural pesticides, flame retardants and DDT.
• The Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment, led by Patricia Buffler, professor of epidemiology. It also will receive $7.5 million. The research program in this center is designed to examine the effects of in utero and early life exposure to potentially carcinogenic chemicals present in homes — including pesticides, flame retardants and secondhand smoke — and these chemicals’ interplay with genetic and epigenetic factors in the development of childhood leukemia.
• The Center for Environmental Public Health, a new formative center led by Dr. Ira Tager, professor and chair of epidemiology. This center will receive $1.5 million. The overall goal of this center, formed in partnership with researchers from Stanford University, is to study the effects of in utero and childhood exposure to ambient air pollutants and bioaerosols on birth outcomes, regulatory T-cell function and the occurrence of asthma in the lower half of California’s Central Valley. The region studied has some of the highest levels of air pollution in the country.

In addition to the centers at UC Berkeley, the NIEHS and the EPA have awarded $1.5 million to UC San Francisco to fund the Pregnancy Exposures to Environmental Contaminants Children’s Environmental Health Formative Center, led by Tracey Woodruff, UCSF associate professor of reproductive health and the environment. Researchers at that center seek to study and prevent harmful exposures to environmental contaminants during pregnancy.

Reference:

UC Berkeley, UC Berkeley gets $16.5 million for three children’s environmental health centers, 16 November 2010

Related articles:

• Prenatal exposure to pesticide linked to ADHD
• New blood test for newborns to detect allergy risk
• A new pediatrics to heal sick children and keep well kids healthy
• Our planet, our children – How are your children doing?

This article aims to describe essential conditions and starting-points for the monetary evaluation of environmentally attributable diseases. Furthermore, a cost calculation within a scenario analysis is conducted for Germany. 

To calculate the costs of environmental health effects we chose a disease-specific perspective. The national statistics of the Federal Statistical Office and the World Health Report burden of disease estimates were used to identify the most important disease categories for Germany. Based on an extensive literature research in computerized databases and the publications of national and international institutions, available costs of illness studies for Germany as well as environmental attributable fractions (EAFs) were identified. Based on these data environmental health costs were calculated with a top-down approach. 

Direct and indirect environmental costs of illness add up to 15-62 billion euro (2006) per year depending on the specific scenario. From our results a tentative scheme is deduced of how the monetary environmental burden of specific diseases is composed and how it can be assigned to major environmental exposures and economic sectors which can be used in setting intervention priorities and evaluating intervention efficiency. 

Within this article, we were able to calculate environmental health costs for Germany based on available, easy to access data and deduce implications for environmental policy decision-making. However, there are restrictions in data quality, as the aetiology of some diseases with respect to environmental impacts is not very well documented and data has not been collected particularly for Germany. 

Reference:   Haucke F, Brückner U., First approaches to the monetary impact of environmental health disturbances in Germany, Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Institute of Health Economics and Health Care Management, Germany, Health Policy. 2009 Sep 8.

Researchers for the first time have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood, bolstering evidence that smog may harm the developing brain. 

The results are in a study of 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. They lived in mostly low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. They had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and truck exhaust. 

At age 5, before starting school, the children were given IQ tests. Those exposed to the most pollution before birth scored on average four to five points lower than children with less exposure. 

That’s a big enough difference that it could affect children’s performance in school, said Frederica Perera, the study’s lead author and director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health.      

Dr. Michael Msall, a University of Chicago pediatrician not involved in the research, said the study doesn’t mean that children living in congested cities “aren’t going to learn to read and write and spell.” 

But it does suggest that you don’t have to live right next door to a belching factory to face pollution health risks, and that there may be more dangers from typical urban air pollution than previously thought, he said. 

“We are learning more and more about low-dose exposure and how things we take for granted may not be a free ride,” he said.

While future research is needed to confirm the new results, the findings suggest exposure to air pollution before birth could have the same harmful effects on the developing brain as exposure to lead, said Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins’ school of public health. 

And along with other environmental harms and disadvantages low-income children are exposed to, it could help explain why they often do worse academically than children from wealthier families, Breysse said.  

“It’s a profound observation,” he said. “This paper is going to open a lot of eyes.”

The study in the August edition of Pediatrics was released Monday. 

In earlier research, involving some of the same children and others, Perera linked prenatal exposure to air pollution with genetic abnormalities at birth that could increase risks for cancer; smaller newborn head size and reduced birth weight. Her research team also has linked it with developmental delays at age 3 and with children’s asthma. 

The researchers studied pollutants that can cross the placenta and are known scientifically as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Main sources include vehicle exhaust and factory emissions. Tobacco smoke is another source, but mothers in the study were nonsmokers. 

A total of 140 study children, 56 percent, were in the high exposure group. That means their mothers likely lived close to heavily congested streets, bus depots and other typical sources of city air pollution; the researchers are still examining data to confirm that, Perera said. The mothers were black or Dominican-American; the results likely apply to other groups, researchers said. 

The researchers took into account other factors that could influence IQ, including secondhand smoke exposure, the home learning environment and air pollution exposure after birth, and still found a strong influence from prenatal exposure, Perera said. 

Dr. Robert Geller, an Emory University pediatrician and toxicologist, said the study can’t completely rule out that pollution exposure during early childhood might have contributed. He also noted fewer mothers in the high exposure group had graduated from high school. While that might also have contributed to the high-dose children’s lower IQ scores, the study still provides compelling evidence implicating prenatal pollution exposure that should prompt additional studies, Geller said. 

The researchers said they plan to continuing monitoring and testing the children to learn whether school performance is affected and if there are any additional long-term effects. 

Reference:    Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, Kids’ lower IQ scores linked to prenatal pollution, July 20, 2009 

A groundbreaking new book, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal-Care Products Endanger Your Health – And What You Can Do About It, issues a long-overdue wake-up call to the public on the dangers of ingredients in common cosmetics and personal-care products whose safety most people naively take for granted.

“We are all playing Russian roulette with toxic-laden cosmetics and personal-care products that we apply to our skin, and to the skin of our infants and children, everyday,” warns author Samuel S. Epstein, MD.

How many women know of the risks to their health by using lipstick, moisturizers or deodorants? Why do so few mothers know of the risks to their infants and children from using personal-care products, including sunscreens? How can the cosmetic and personalcare products industry recklessly continue to ignore these dangers?

Toxic Beauty is a fully documented exposé which reveals the wide range of avoidable health risks, some even life threatening, that Americans are unknowingly exposed to in their everyday cosmetic and personal-care products. “But there is also good news. These toxic exposures are 100 percent avoidable by taking just a few basic precautions,” says Epstein.

Toxic Beauty is written by Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, an internationally recognized expert on avoidable causes of cancer, besides other toxic-related diseases, and investigative reporter Randall Fitzgerald. And besides chronicling the pervasive marketing of dangerous products, Toxic Beauty also informs readers on the growing availability of safe products.

• In the pages of Toxic Beauty, you’ll find:
• The five categories of common toxic ingredients in cosmetics and personal-care products.
• Toxic ingredients in these products have been incriminated in a wide range of diseases,
  particularly cancers. These include malignant melanoma of the skin, and lethal ovarian cancer.
• They also include birth defects in male infants.
• Safe synthetic and certified organic products as alternative to dangerous products.
• Dangerous exposures to employees from prolonged exposures to toxic ingredients in unlabeled products in poorly ventilated and unregulated beauty and nail salons.
• Tear-out sheets listing all major categories of toxic ingredients; also tables on five major classes of toxic ingredients that can be downloaded from the Cancer Prevention Coalition Web site: www.preventcancer.com

Epstein warns, “Unbelievably, the FDA has recklessly failed to protect us from toxic ingredients in cosmetics and personal-care products for the last six decades. What’s more, the mainstream industry has remained criminally indifferent to the dangers of their products. In sharp contrast, European regulations ban all products containing toxic ingredients.”

So, the reality is that protecting yourself and your family unfortunately is still entirely up to you. Toxic Beauty shows you just how.

***
Samuel S. Epstein, MD, professor emeritus of environmental health at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has published 270 scientific articles and authored or coauthored 15 books.

Dr. Epstein has been a consultant to the U.S. Senate and is frequently invited to give congressional testimony. He has also consulted for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor. He has appeared on national TV shows including “60 Minutes”, “Face the Nation”, “Meet the Press,” “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, along with major documentaries, including the 2004 prize-winning “The Corporation.”

Randall Fitzgerald has been an investigative newspaper and magazine reporter and author for 37 years. He has written features for Reader’s Digest, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent book is The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health.

Book Details: Title: Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health – And What You Can Do about It.
Author: Samuel S. Epstein, MD and Randall Fitzgerald
Publisher: BenBella Books, Distributed by Perseus Distribution
Publication: April 2009, Cloth, ISBN: 97881933771625, General Trade, 224 pages. Available at bookstores everywhere